Article written by Stephanie Zou.
Did you know that customers who reach out to your support team are usually just a small percentage of your entire customer base? And when they do reach out, 95 percent of those customers have an average of only one ticket in your Zendesk?
That’s a pretty sad relationship. One ticket—one conversation—with a fraction of your customers.
Zendesk has traditionally been used as a tool to collect and manage your customer conversations, for communicating with those customers who reach out for help.
But what about your customers who don’t reach out?
Luckily, Zendesk has friends named MailChimp and SurveyMonkey to help you reach out to your customers and have more informed conversations. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you with a question or issue, you’ll be able to know who your customers are outside of a support interaction and proactively start a conversation. You can do this by following these four steps:
Step 1: Gather information about your customers
You can gather all sorts of customer data in user fields, like what products they use, when they first became a customer, and if they’re a VIP customer.
Step 2: Know your customers beyond the ticket
Today, you’ll see the new People icon on the navigation bar in your Zendesk. Clicking this icon takes you to your customer lists, where you can learn more about your customers. Similar to ticket views, customer lists organize your customers based on common attributes. Using the user fields you created in step one, you can create meaningful views of your customers, like new customers who signed up in the last month or a list of VIP customers.
Step 3: Reach out for customer feedback and ideas
With your customer lists created, you can use the SurveyMonkey Create app to ask new customers in the past month, for example, how their experience has been with your company. Or, you might ask your VIP customers for product ideas and feedback.
Step 4: Follow up with important announcements
You can also target specific customer lists with an email announcement using the MailChimp Campaign app. You might send a special “welcome to the community” newsletter to new customers. Or, alert customers you know prefer a certain product that a new addition was added to the line.
Customer lists are available to Zendesk customers on Regular, Plus, and Enterprise plans. They will be rolled out to customers over the course of today and tomorrow. You can find the new apps in the Zendesk App Marketplace and start communicating better and developing more meaningful relationships with your customers.
