FAQ

A. That's not a question, but I agree.

A. I live in the Bay Area, California. I grew up in the Midwest and made a daring escape in my 20’s. Spent a few years in LA before deciding it wasn't for me—even though the weather was perfect. Had a brief hyperfixation on moving to Amsterdam before I visited in the winter and had my heart broken over how miserable it is. Finally landed in what I now call my forever home in the Bay (interest rates are crazy y'all).

A. I spent the first few (ahem...many) years of my professional career in IT customer support roles, working out of ticketing systems like Zendesk—from Footprints to Freshdesk, Samanage to Spiceworks, and everything in between.

In 2017, when my team needed a new ticketing system, I took the initiative to research, compare, and ultimately lead the implementation. I landed on Zendesk—a system I had never used before—but it quickly became clear that it was the best fit for our needs. I dove in headfirst, mastering it along the way, and fell in love with it so much that I decided to make a career out of it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

A. I haven’t used them all, but I've used a lot. Facebook's internal tool they called “Tasks" is the best I've ever used, but it's not available to the public. That leaves us with Zendesk as the best system money can buy in my definitely unbiased opinion. ^.^

What makes a great ticketing system? Ask me in an interview—I promise I'll ramble for an appropriate amount of time.

A. As a working Sr. CX Systems Admin, I meet with our Zendesk Account Executive monthly to go over how their newly announced and beta features can help to meet our business goals.

Additionally, I subscribe to Zendesk's newsletter where they love to toot their own horn on new features, announce guest speakers at their events that have nothing to do with the product or CX in general, and conveniently not talk about pricing—I’m not bitter though.

Lastly, I have a daily calendar item to review Zendesk’s announcements page, release notes, developer updates, and service notifications.

A. AI is the elephant in the room. Leadership sees it. I see it. Customer service agents who are losing their jobs see it.

The desire for self-service through on-demand chatbots is growing tremenduosly. Human agents simply cannot and will not keep up with this demand. We only have so many working hours in a day, so much budget, and quite frankly—so much patience with customers that can be demanding. The solution to all 3 of these problems is AI and Zendesk has made it very clear that they're going all in.

Will this entirely replace humans? I hope not—I still need a job! But seriously and gravely, Zendesk and other ticket-handling tools will move to more advanced AI over time that is more useful to customers and easier to manage by businesses to reduce overhead costs and increase support availability.

My question for you is—Have you considered an AI support strategy? I can help.

A. Scroll just a tiny bit further to the contact button. :-D