How to automate customer support workflows using Zoho Flow

Customer support is the main point of contact when your customers need assistance, and it's important that they make a good impression. However, it can be a tiring job, with support tickets constantly flowing in. Your support team has a lot on their plate in addition to talking to your customers, including the creation and assigning of tickets, communication within the team, and any number of other systematic procedures.

These additional tasks often collide with their core job, which is to communicate with customers and offer them support. This is where you can implement customer support workflow automation—customer support automation can save a lot of time, as there are many additional, manual tasks that don't need your support team's direct attention, letting you focus on the more important stuff at hand.

What is customer support automation?

Customer support automation is the process of automating your customer support tasks by integrating your help desk application with other apps. Help desk applications are generally used to manage customer support tickets more efficiently. If you're using an application like Zoho Desk, it offers you an easy way to manage your tickets, keep track of them, analyze data, and more.

However, you might need multiple SaaS applications to handle different aspects of your work. And when you have multiple apps, you want them to talk to each other and share data across them. Customer support workflow automation can help you connect your help desk applications with other apps, ensuring a seamless transfer of data that saves you time, eliminates any scope for error, and reduces effort that could be put to more productive work.

Additionally, implementing customer support automation within your organization will enhance your customer experience. Your customers will be able to reach out to you at any time and won't have to wait as long to have their questions answered, giving them more confidence in your business and helping retain them.

How to automate your customer support workflows

To bring your applications together and build automated workflows using them, you'll need an integration platform. Integration platforms let you connect your applications, helping you build automated workflows between apps with seamless and instant transfer of data. Zoho Flow is one example of a centralised integration platform that allows users to integrate applications and create automated workflows.

Now let's take a look at how an integration platform like Zoho Flow can help you implement customer support automation:

Parse form data as help desk fields

Your support tickets can come in as form entries, but having to check those forms manually and create tickets based on them can be tiring. Zoho Flow can help you automate this process by bringing your desk application and your form builder together.

You can integrate a form builder application like Zoho Forms with help desk applications like Zoho Desk, ZenDesk, or FreshDesk with the help of Zoho Flow. With this integration in place, every time a new form entry is made, the form will be parsed and data will be added as fields in Zoho Desk, saving you time and effort.

Parse incoming emails as desk fields

Zoho Flow's email trigger can help you parse incoming templated emails and trigger workflows using the data found in them. This trigger can come in handy if you receive support tickets through emails.

You can set up an email trigger by sending the email template to a provided email address.
 

Once the templated email is sent, you can highlight the data that you want to be parsed. This way, whenever a templated email is received in your mail box, the highlighted data will be parsed and, by setting up Zoho Desk as the action, you can have the highlighted data added as fields in Zoho Desk.

Notify the support team when a ticket is created

When a new support ticket is received, it's important to address it as soon as possible. However, when all your support agents are busy, one or more tickets might get missed in the mix. That's why it's important for you and your team to get notified whenever a new support ticket is created.

By integrating help desk applications with messaging apps like Zoho Cliq or Slack, you can have automated text notifications sent to your support channel every time a new ticket is created. This way, your team can instantly know when a support ticket is received and have it assigned immediately.

Create a summary of a support ticket

AI platforms have evolved over the past few years to handle work that only humans used to be able to do. While allowing AI platforms like OpenAI and ChatGPT to handle your overall support operations isn't a great idea just yet, they can help make the process of managing support tickets easier.

Many AI platforms can read support tickets and summarize them, minimizing the time required for support executives when reading longer and more complicated tickets. Additionally, they can also create responses for a ticket and save them as drafts. Once that's done, the support executives only have to make the necessary changes and send the response—saving ample time and effort.

Create project management tasks for bug-related support tickets

When a new bug ticket is raised, the ticket needs to be escalated to the development team as soon as possible. To do that requires creating a new task in your project management application manually, which is error-prone and time-consuming.

With the help of Zoho Flow, you can have this process automated by integrating project management applications like Zoho Projects with help desk apps like Zoho Desk. This way, every time a support ticket is tagged as a glitch or a bug in Zoho Desk, a task will automatically be created in Zoho Projects.

Create tickets when refunds are initiated

Similarly, if your customer requires a refund, it's of the highest priority to have them connected to your customer support team immediately, helping them grasp the problem and initiate the refund as soon as possible. This is essential in helping build trust with your customers.

Integrating online payment platforms like Zoho Checkout with Zoho Desk can help you here, as this integration will instantly create a ticket in Zoho Desk whenever a refund is requested in Zoho Checkout—enabling you to get in touch with customers and identify any problems they've encountered with your product or service.

These are just a few customer support automation workflows using Zoho Flow. For a real-world example, one of our customers, BlazeSoft, used Zoho Flow to automate their customer support and enhance their customer experience. They integrated Zoho Desk, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Power BI, and more using Zoho Flow. Check out their case study to learn more about their use cases.

With over 900 applications available for integration via Zoho Flow, you'll be able to integrate desk applications like Zoho Desk, Zendesk, and more with a plethora of applications, creating customized workflows tailor-made to suit your requirements.