We are delighted to announce a new Status Dashboard for the Zendesk Customer Service integration. The dashboard enables customer service agents to have real-time visibility into major incidents that are impacting their customers within the Zendesk tool suite, so they can proactively update customers when an incident occurs.

With the shift to digital-first business models, customer service is on the front lines to deliver exceptional service to customers who are expecting near-perfect digital experiences. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is top of mind for customer service leaders looking to retain and delight their customers and is directly linked to customer service experiences. This puts even more pressure on customer service representatives to deliver more with less.

Customers expect more than fast resolution times; they want proactive service and real-time status of the issues that are impacting them to continue to build trust and loyalty in the brand. Because, options are literally at our fingertips, and finding alternatives only takes a few seconds.

Timely Status Updates Are Critical to Satisfaction

Timely information and context around customer-impacting issues are critical to delivering great customer experiences. Things sometimes break, but what customers remember most is the service they receive during the incident and not the incident itself. Today, nearly 50% of customers start looking for alternative solutions after just one bad experience, there is no room for second chances.

Unfortunately, customer service organizations are not set up for success, they have underinvested in processes and technology and are struggling to catch up to their business needs. They lack visibility and real-time data around customer impacting issues and work across disparate tools that aren’t aligned to deliver great customer experiences. This leaves customer service agents feeling frustrated and unable to take care of customers the right way. When agents are undervalued and not resourced with the tools and processes they need, they simply won’t care enough to go the extra mile for your customers. They are working with legacy tools and lack an integrated tool stack that gives them access to the information they need in the moments that matter.

In many customer service organizations, this is how a customer-facing issue might play out: A customer finds that something is broken and contacts customer service. The agent quickly realizes that they were not aware there was a larger issue because they lack real-time visibility into customer-impacting issues. There is a good chance that engineering has already flagged this issue and is working to resolve it, but customer service does not have access to that critical piece of information to update the customer.

So now, while the customer is waiting on the phone or via a live chat, the customer service agent is trying to find out what’s going on by checking different screens or trying to reach someone on the technical team to get more info.

This experience is bad for both sides. Customers are left frustrated and disappointed with the lack of access to real time status updates from customer service, which erodes trust in the brand and negatively impacts satisfaction. Customer Service Agents experience frustration and stress at not being able to proactively and effectively assist customers.

PagerDuty’s Status Dashboard for the Zendesk Integration

Getting ahead of issues is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s imperative for delivering a great experience to your customers. Arming front-line agents with all the information they need around customer-impacting issues is key to delivering great service.

PagerDuty for Customer Service + Zendesk enables real-time response, better cross-team collaboration, and proactive customer communications. With fully bi-directional communications, we are connecting people, operations, and data in real time to solve issues faster. The Status Dashboard further deepens the integration with Zendesk by delivering visibility and real-time status updates directly to customer service agents within the Zendesk tool suite.

With PagerDuty’s Status Dashboard, your customer service teams can:

• Gain complete “work where you are” functionality that gives access to real-time data and context around customer-impacting issues
• Create a united front between customer service and technical teams to get ahead of customer issues and resolve them faster
• Improve agent morale by saving time and reducing context switching so agents can help more customers in a timely manner

We saw that customer service teams needed to be better aligned and coordinated with technical teams. With PagerDuty’s new Customer Service plan, customer service organizations can gain a holistic view across data, people, and operations. They can be better connected with technical teams to work as a united front to quickly solve customer issues and proactively update impacted customers to improve customer satisfaction. As a result, customer service teams can scale and automate to solve more issues faster. Check out the integration guide to learn more and contact your account manager to get started.