On May 6, 2025, the Zendesk team hosted the second episode of the series “5 Steps to provide email support - Step 2: Organize your team.” This session focused on strategies for effectively organizing your support team, including defining roles and groups, managing customer organizations, and leveraging custom fields to improve ticket handling and reporting. Our speakers demonstrated key Zendesk features live and shared actionable tips to help teams scale support operations efficiently, ensuring faster response times and better customer experiences.

Highlights include:

• Roles: We covered user permissions and predefined roles, as well as how to create custom roles tailored to specific needs. We focused on assigning the correct roles to ensure efficient workflows, security, and accountability.

• Groups: We reviewed how groups organize agents by skills, responsibilities, and departments. This can be useful for routing tickets to the right teams, enhancing collaboration, improving task allocation, and supporting smooth onboarding of new agents.

• Organizations: The team shared how organizations group end users by company, department, or other criteria. This can be helpful for routing tickets based on customer attributes such as language or time zone, improving reporting, and reducing duplicate tickets by expanding visibility within organizations.

• Custom fields: We explored custom ticket, user, and organization fields that capture unique data beyond default fields. Various field types that support automation and reporting were reviewed, highlighting how custom fields enhance customer profiles, ticket management, and operational automation.

• Importing users:We demonstrated how to bulk import users via CSV files to save time and reduce errors. Best practices included importing organizations first to properly link users, avoiding duplicates, and testing small batches before large imports.

• Ticket routing and lifecycle: We highlighted the importance of proper ticket status usage for SLA tracking and workflow management. Automated routing via triggers was discussed, showing how tickets can be assigned to agents or groups based on criteria like email domain or organization. This improves accountability, leverages expertise, and boosts customer satisfaction.

What we learned

Participants gained a clear and practical understanding of how to organize their teams in Zendesk, including:

• Defining user roles and permissions to ensure the right access for agents and admins, improving workflow efficiency and security.

• Using Zendesk’s organizational tools to streamline support teams, reduce confusion, and maintain smooth workflows.

• Grouping agents by skill sets, departments, or language proficiency to route tickets efficiently and foster collaboration.

• Saving time and preventing errors by bulk importing users, especially when organization data is prepared first.

• Understanding the ticket lifecycle and setting up automated routing to maintain accountability and deliver timely, expert customer support.

• Practical tips for managing ticket views and using notifications to stay on top of incoming requests.

Next steps

Don’t miss next week’s webinar, which will focus on building the agent experience with strong email support strategies.

Webinar resources

• [Webinar recording] 5 steps to provide email support - Step 2: Organize your team

• [Presentation deck] 5 steps to provide email support - Step 2: Organize your team

• Zendesk essentials Youtube playlist

• Zendesk essentials: Live tutorials series page

Useful resources

• Launch guide for Zendesk

• About organizations and groups

• Bulk importing users