Alleaves Zendesk restructure proposal

Problem

our processes, guides, and training videos live across Slack, Loom, Google, Tango, and more. Employees struggle to find what to send a customer, new hires struggle to learn, and an AI agent can't use any of it. Almost every integration below depends on this, which is why it's at the top of the list.

Solution

make Zendesk's help center our source of truth.

• Customer-facing articles the AI agent can also use.
• Internal-only sections for employee procedures, hidden from customers.
• Working from the Zendesk knowledge base lets us use Zendesk to its fullest potential.

Benefit

One place to create and maintain documentation, which is easy to navigate and integrates well with all of Zendesk's features.

Problem

our employees type the same answers to the same questions, over and over.

Solution

a shared library of approved replies.

• One click drops in the approved answer.
• The same click can update the ticket too (owner, category, attachments).
• These templates can be shared with everyone, or only with the specific departments that require specialized answers.

Benefit

This gives us consistent answers, faster replies, and one place to update answers to commonly asked questions when something changes.

Problem

Internally, customers can't see what the status of their tickets is, and externally, operators have nowhere to talk shop.

Solution

a self-service portal and a community.

• Portal: customers track their own requests, reply, reopen, and rate the outcome. Regional managers can see their stores' tickets.
• Community: customers and other operators answer each other, share best practices, and give feedback in one place we can see. Because the space is public it also boosts our SEO and positions us as the premier open community for operators (that exists at the moment).
• We turn useful threads into help center articles, which is how they reach the AI agent.

Benefit

fewer "any update?" emails, customers helping customers, and industry trends we can spot early.

Problem

Chats from the Alleaves site turn anything a customer types into a ticket, including ones with no information or context at all, and that wastes our time. On top of that, the Alleaves redesign is going to build its own knowledge base and AI agent, duplicating what we already have.

Solution

put our Zendesk AI agent on the site, the app, and email.

• It answers from the help center first.
• It asks the questions support would ask anyway, so the ticket arrives ready to act on and the customer feels looked after right away.
• When it can't answer, it hands the conversation to a Support team with the context attached.
• Works on the web app, the mobile app, and incoming email.

Benefit

fewer empty tickets, faster answers for common questions, one AI agent to govern, and no separate build for the site team.

Problem

the website offers customers only a generic email address.

Solution

department forms.

• Separate forms for Support, CX, and Product Escalations.
• Each form asks for what employees need up front.
• Submissions go straight to that department's queue.

Benefit

complete requests land with the right team, not in a shared inbox.

Problem

outside Support, most teams handle customer email from their own inboxes. Nobody else can see the thread, nobody can pick it up if that person is out or busy, and if someone leaves, the rest of the team has no record of what was discussed or where it stands.

Solution

every department gets a Zendesk address and a shared queue.

• Department addresses such as cx@ and escalations@ come into Zendesk, and replies go out from the department address, not a personal one.
• Each department gets its own queue where the whole team can see open work.
• Employees can forward anything that still lands in a personal inbox into Zendesk, and the customer stays the requester.

Benefit

any team member can pick up where a colleague left off, nothing stays isolated to one person, and Zendesk is the record we audit and plan from as a team.

Problem

customers have personal numbers for people all over the company and text whoever they know. That person has to stop what they're doing and pass it to the right team. Getting work texts on a personal phone is stressful and wears people down.

Solution

a dedicated support text number.

• Inbound texts become tickets with full history.
• Texts route and autoreply like every other channel.
• One number for everyone, routed to the right team with everything the customer already told us attached.
• We work this out with CX: they help us choose the workflow and the rollout, and we build it together.

Benefit

a team works the request instead of one person's phone, and nobody's personal number is the support line.

Problem

busy days produce missed calls and voicemails that lack information.

Solution

connect 3CX now; consider Zendesk phones later.

• Now: connect 3CX to Zendesk so callers are identified and calls are logged.
• Option: move support lines to Zendesk voice. An AI agent answers, gathers the caller's details, and tries to resolve from our knowledge base. It transfers to an available person with the transcript attached; if nobody is free, the call still becomes a ticket with the gathered information.
• Later, if we choose: once AI handles first contact, gold or platinum customers bypass it as part of their tier and reach a human right away, on calls and every other channel.

Benefit

every call logged and the caller identified today; a path to round-the-clock phone coverage without any additional headcount.

Problem

tags are inconsistent, so we can't filter or report on them.

Solution

one tag standard.

• A fixed, documented tag list instead of free-form tagging.
• Customer-level tags apply to every ticket from that customer automatically.

Benefit

tags become something we can trust for filtering and routing, and they feed the pattern detection in item 15 so recurring issues show up early.

Problem

someone has to go through the queue manually, work out what each ticket is about, and spread the work evenly across the team.

Solution

let Zendesk assign the work, with AI reading each ticket first.

• Zendesk assigns each ticket by who's available and how much they already have.
• AI triage reads each new ticket and classifies it by topic, customer sentiment, and product on arrival; classification is already included in our plan.
• With the Copilot add-on, triage can act on what it finds: send the ticket to the right team; autoreply with self-service links; ask for missing details before an employee opens it; flag upset customers for faster handling.

Benefit

nobody sorts the queue by hand anymore; work spreads evenly and lands with the right team before anyone has to open it.

Problem

company, contact, and store records are inconsistent, and nothing carries over from one ticket to the next, so we type the same details in again on every new ticket.

Solution

one record for everything.

• One record per company and per contact; new users attach to their company automatically.
• One record per store, linked to its people and tickets.
• monday.com connected both ways, so the record stays correct in both systems (item 13).

Benefit

when a customer emails in, their details are already there and stay there; nobody types them in again.

Problem

today we only have Open, Pending, and Blocked. None of them say whether we're waiting on the customer, on Product, or on a third party, so tickets sit and only the person with the ticket knows why.

Solution

descriptive statuses, with automations that act on them.

• We create statuses that say what's actually happening, such as "Waiting on customer," "Waiting on Product," "Waiting on partner".
• Customers with help desk access can see the status too.
• Waiting on the customer: automatic reminders, then we close the ticket if they stay silent.
• Waiting on us: the assigned employee gets a nudge when a ticket has sat too long.

Benefit

everyone can see why a ticket is waiting, follow-ups on both sides happen without anyone chasing, and because every ticket uses the same statuses we can report on where the time actually goes.

Problem

everything we know about an account lives in monday.com: which clients are on what status, what their contract is, when it starts and ends, whether they're churning. None of it reaches the ticket, so employees work blind and every account looks the same.

Solution

sync monday.com and Zendesk both ways.

• The company record in Zendesk carries the account's monday fields: status, contract start and end, account owner, plan. More follows once we understand with CX what they need.
• Tickets act on those fields: at-risk and renewing accounts get priority, and their account owner is notified.
• A change in either system lands in the other.

Benefit

employees see the whole account on every ticket, priority follows it, and both teams keep one correct record.

Problem

escalations disappear inside Product, and customers reporting the same bug get different answers. One problem ticket lets us update every affected customer at once instead of chasing each ticket by hand.

Solution

problem tickets and a Jira link.

• When several customers hit the same bug, we open one problem ticket for the bug and link each customer's ticket to it. Solving the problem ticket solves every linked ticket and sends every customer the same update.
• Engineering keeps working in Jira; their progress flows back to the ticket automatically.
• Support clears these off their queue instead of sitting on them, which helps their numbers, and nobody has to check each ticket to see if anything moved.

Benefit

one fix, one consistent message to everyone affected, and a visible Support-to-Product handoff.

Problem

no reliable view of support performance, recurring issues, or backlog health.

Solution

• Dashboards built on standardized fields.
• Zendesk's free VOC (Voice of the Customer) Patterns app groups tickets by what customers are actually writing in about, so a recurring issue and its cause show up before it becomes ten tickets.
• A named owner for the system and a named owner for knowledge.

Benefit

recurring problems surface before they grow, and performance is visible without manual analysis.