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Manage and improve your customer service with Zendesk
Trusted by some of the world’s leading companies, such as Uber and Xero — along with over 100,000 other businesses — Zendesk is an open and flexible customer service solution that aims to help you shape up your customer service experience. Offering a robust suite of tools such as a clear and helpful ticketing system, as well as giving you the ability to generate in-depth reports so that you can monitor ticket volume, customer satisfaction levels, and team performance, Zendesk gives you the opportunity to really get to grips with how your customers interact with your support team. Handy!
But why let all this powerful reporting capability go to waste? The best way to motivate and inform your support staff is to give them an easy-to-understand and clear overview of how they’re performing, keeping them in the loop about any issues that may be going on. You can also empower your team leaders to make critical decisions, by getting these dashboards and reports up on your office screens and putting the data at their fingertips. That’s where Fugo’s TV Dashboards feature comes in.
Fugo TV Dashboards & Your Zendesk
The TV Dashboards feature within Fugo allows for easy integration with third-party dashboards, like Zendesk. It’s secure, smart, and quick to set up - and once it’s done, you can insert your dashboard into your pre-existing playlists, or other content currently displaying on your Fugo-connected screens.
One of the most important aspects of this feature is the way that it’s been built with your security and privacy in mind. Other integration solutions can expose your data by storing your login details on a third-party device (which can be lost, stolen, or remotely accessed), or create a publicly available URL, which means anybody could hop on and view your sensitive company reports and data.
The Fugo TV Dashboards feature, however, is fully encrypted and works in a pretty unique way. It stores your dashboard login credentials on a private Cloud server, which records and encrypts your login process, walking through it and returning an encrypted screenshot every time it fetches the latest version of your dashboard! Your data is safe and sound — always.
Best Practices for Using Zendesk with Fugo
Just before we get into the walkthrough for connecting your digital signage with your Zendesk dashboard (we’ll get there in a sec, I promise!), let’s take a quick look at a couple of best practices for integrating your Fugo CMS with a third-party service:
1. Create a service account:
We've worked hard to develop the TV dashboards feature so that your sensitive data is completely secure. But as an extra precaution, we highly recommend using a 'least privileged' service account when setting up your dashboards - this is usually an account that has read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display on your screen(s.) You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.
2. Start with your dashboard URL
It's often the case that you can navigate directly to your target dashboard's URL when creating a new dashboard in Fugo. This will require you to log in, and then you’ll be redirected back to your destination. This is the quickest and most reliable journey you can make in Fugo Dashboards as it cuts out unnecessary steps in your journey.
3. Search for your dashboard
Most dashboard services have search capabilities. Instead of clicking through multiple menus, you can get to your target content quicker and more reliably by searching for it. We recommend searching the full name of the content you want to display, as partial search terms may return more items you'll have to sift through.
Connect your screens to a Fugo account
4.1 Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.
4.2 Make sure your screen(s) are connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for your preferred device in our hardware collection.
Configure your Zendesk dashboard in Fugo
2.3 Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.
2.4 Click Create Dashboard to get started. This will take you to the New Dashboard recorder page where you will follow the instructions to capture and preview your dashboard before publishing it to screen.
2.5 Next, go and grab the URL that you use to log in to your Zendesk account (which could be https://www.zendesk.com/login/). Paste it into the URL field, and click Go.
2.6 If this is your first time creating a TV dashboard, a popup guiding you on how to configure your Chrome browser to allow the Fugo recorder to run in incognito mode will appear. You can find our instructions for allowing incognito mode here. If this is not your first time, you can skip this step.
2.7 Fugo will open an incognito window using the URL you gave it earlier. Whether you’ve used your direct dashboard URL or just your login URL, you’ll see the Zendesk login screen here. Go ahead and enter your Zendesk account details to log in as you usually would.
2.8 Once you’ve signed in, you’re going to need to navigate to the dashboard that you want to show on your office screens (unless you used your direct dashboard URL in step 2.5). On the right-hand side of the original Fugo window, you’ll notice that the Fugo Recorder is recording every step that you take while you’re navigating around Zendesk. These steps will be sent off to the private Cloud server once you’ve reached your dashboard and captured it, where Fugo will walk through them every time the TV Dashboards feature fetches the latest data for your dashboard.
💡 When you’ve reached your dashboard listing screen inside Zendesk, we recommend using the search bar to find your dashboard - even if you only have one. This is just to help out the Fugo Recorder and ensure it can always reliably and easily find your dashboard; there’s no telling how many dashboards you might want to create in the future, and we don’t want the Recorder getting lost!
2.9 When you’ve reached your dashboard, you can capture it in a couple of ways. You could use the Capture Dashboard button in the bottom right of the Recorder window, but Zendesk displays an online chat element that can hinder your display! We would recommend instead that you need to use the Element Screenshot tool, which is the button just to the right of the Capture Dashboard button. This allows you to select a specific area of the screen instead of capturing the whole screen.
However, Zendesk isn’t quite Digital Signage Ready by default, because their dashboards come out very tall and it’s hard to read. You’ll need to create a dashboard that has 1 screen height to ensure that it works alongside your display. Thankfully, that’s a pretty quick process - here’s how to take care of that:
2.10 Clone your chosen Dashboard.
2.11 Open up your cloned dashboard, and select Edit from the top toolbar.
2.12 Select Tab Height from the Tap Options toolbar, and set it to 1 (or an appropriate height for your digital signage - this might take some playing around to find what works for you).
2.13 Click Publish from the bottom toolbar.
Phew! Big step. But now that we’re done, onto the next one:
2.10 The Fugo recording window will now close. You’ll see a preview area in Fugo CMS which should be showing a loading message at the moment. Behind the scenes, Fugo is encrypting and sending the steps that you walked it through off to the secure Cloud server, which is then running through them and returning a screenshot of your dashboard for display.
This can take anywhere from several seconds to a couple of minutes, so don’t sweat if it seems to be taking a little while! Once your dashboard appears in the preview area, make sure it looks the way you’d expect it to.
2.11 Once you’re happy with everything, you can either click the Publish button to immediately publish your dashboard to your currently connected screens or channels or into your existing playlists. You can also select Save, which allows you to return and figure out what you’d like to do with it later.
Zendesk Dashboard Tips
Shifting your help desk solution over to Zendesk is a great first step towards upping your customer service game — and displaying your reports on your workplace TV screens or digital signage is the best second step! But working with digital signage does come with its own quirks to bear in mind.
Helping a whole team of people understand in-depth data and dashboards, and get the most use out of them, especially when the data is up on a screen that they’re viewing at a distance can be a skill in and of itself — and we’ve got a couple of tips that can help you achieve it:
Pick out your Key Performance Indicators. Your Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) should be relatively simple and easy-to-understand metrics that can show, at a glance, how your team is performing. These could be things like Tickets Created accompanied by Tickets Closed, or a display of Ticket Statuses. You could also show Average Chat Time or Average Resolution Time, both of which should be simple percentage- or time-based figures that can help your team understand what their performance is like. With these straight-forward KPIs, you can set your team objectives to hit that are clear, and display them alongside more in-depth graphs or charts.
Celebrate your victories. Zendesk can allow you to display Top Performing team members. Putting together a leaderboard can encourage healthy competition and teamwork and can reward and motivate your hardest-working and most successful team members by letting them know that their efforts are being recognized. However, outside of just individual success, you can reward your whole team by communicating positive messages in green. If your support team is hitting their KPIs, and they look up at the screen to see a bevy of green statistics all over the dashboard, that’s going to be a good feeling. Funnily enough, that ties neatly into our next point:
Communicate with color. Reading from a distance is hard. Looking at intricate charts and small text from a distance is liable to cause eye strain and headaches, and you don’t want your support staff having to get up from their desks every time they want to get an overview of their performance — so you have to get smart about getting the gist across without having to get every detail over.
Color is a great way to do this; we all understand that green means good, and red means bad; you can use this to your advantage by coloring positive statistics in green, and negative in red. That way, your support staff can understand how the day is going without even really having to focus on the screen, helping to maintain their focus on their work while still keeping them informed. Super handy!Less is more. Once you’ve decided on your key metrics, you should make the most of them. Don’t flood your dashboard with every available metric (and Zendesk offers a tonne of information and cool metrics to dig into, so this can be really tempting!) because it will just overwhelm anybody who’s trying to understand what’s going on. This kind of granular insight can be useful for your higher-up management teams, but even then too much information can actually lead to less of an understanding, as opposed to more.
Stick with three, four, or five overall statistics that outline how what your team performance is like, and how satisfied your customers are, and add only the most helpful and critical information outside of that. It might seem like you’re not giving everybody all the data you possibly could, but it’s much more useful than filling every available space on the screen!
The experts over at Zendesk have a really great knowledge base for all of your dashboard questions - including this handy guide covering their prebuilt dashboard templates, as well as going into how you can create your own dashboards!
We hope this guide has answered all of your questions about hooking your Zendesk dashboards and reports up with your Fugo-connected screens and digital signage, but if you have any remaining issues, questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to drop our support team a line at support@fugo.ai. They’re always happy to help out and answer any queries you might have!