Automating Approvals in Zendesk: For Support Agents

One process that is often overlooked in customer support but almost always takes up time and energy is handling approvals. New hire onboarding, feature requests, asset allocation, Applicant processing, etc. all need to go through an approval process to make sure they adhere to the process criteria and quality guidelines the company upholds for their support agents and end-users.

Having a set approval process in Zendesk Support will help you track the resolution of a support ticket as well as provide clarity to other agents about the ticket’s current approval status. In this blog post, let’s go through an easy and quick way to automate approval processes in Zendesk Support.

1. Identify the Approval Objective

The very first step, to begin with, is to clearly define the approval goal or outcome. Some basic questions you need to ask yourself are “Who are the different support agents who are responsible for approving?”, “What is the end-goal or benefit of this approval process?”, etc. It is also crucial to keep all the relevant stakeholders informed about the approval objective prior to crafting them. Once you’ve identified the key ingredients of your approval workflow recipe, head over to HappyFox Workflows to start crafting the approval processes.

2. Build Your Approval Workflow

Building an approval workflow inside HappyFox workflows for Zendesk support is quick and simple. Learn how to set up workflows for Zendesk Support.

With HappyFox workflows, you can incorporate multi-stage approval processes inside your existing support workflows. Here are the things you need to consider while building your approval workflow:

• Define who Approves the Workflow: At every approval stage, it is important to clearly define who will approve the entity or workflow. You can choose agents from your own department or even have agents from other departments participate in your approval workflows.
• Specify the Approval Nature: If you require a committee of people to approve the request, you can specify the nature in which an entity/process can be approved:
  • Everyone: This will require the approval from everyone for the entity/process to be approved.
  • Majority: This only requires the majority in the committee to approve the entity/process
  • Any: This will only require approval from any member of the committee but will wait till the entire committee is done casting their vote.
  • First Responder: The first responder will immediately approve/reject based on the first person’s vote. It will not wait for all members to vote.
• Customize the Approval Notification Template: HappyFox Workflows packs a powerful rich-text editor to customize your approval e-mail template. You can also use placeholders to dynamically populate Zendesk support data into your approval e-mails. HappyFox Workflows also allows attachments from Zendesk tickets to be selectively shared with approvers for their examination.
• Define Post-Approval Scenarios: For every approval workflow, there are two possible outcomes – the entity or process either gets approved or rejected. With HappyFox workflows, you can further customize the different sets of workflow actions (like updating ticket fields) that succeed in successful/failed approval. Better yet, you can also set up multi-level or hierarchical approval workflows that depend on the outcome of one approval workflow, before firing another approval workflow.

3. Fine-tune your Approvals

Once you’ve crafted your approvals workflow, you can always come back, edit and improve it. HappyFox Workflows provides useful options like “Save and Test” to individually test every workflow action. To make approval workflows efficient, every single step must be optimized. By inspecting all areas of the approval workflows before and after the execution, you will be able to streamline the overall process and maximize productivity.

Gathering approvals are necessary at almost every customer support scenario. Don’t let your productivity be compromised by not having an automated approval process in place.

Did you know that you can also include non-agent approvers for your approval workflows? We’ll guide you through automating Approvals in Zendesk: For non-support Agents in a future blog post.

If you’re new to HappyFox Workflows, sign up for a demo session today and we’ll guide you on your approval use-cases inside Zendesk Support!