A b s t r a c tA Zombie-apocalypse is not something that keeps most support teams paranoid

about. After all, it isn’t something that happens every day.

But that is exactly what’s so scary about it.

Zombie attacks can stem out of pretty much anything, right from a barrel of toxic gas

that was accidentally opened, to a Black Friday sale with deep discounts on the latest

gadget.

And you can be pretty sure that the attack is going to start quick and grow big with

very little warning. Unless your support team is ready when it strikes, you might wake

up the next morning to find a burnt-up help desk, and a lot fewer customers.

So how can you can you get your customer support to be ready for the zombie

apocalypse?

This guide will walk you through everything you can and should do to make your

support team proactive before the zombies rise, effective during the attack, and

heroes after.

W h y i s h a v i n g a Z o m b i e - r e a d y

s u p p o r t p o l i c y s o i m p o r t a n t ?

Sometime last year, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published an article on

their blog about how individuals can be prepared for a zombie apocalypse. But just

a few humans are no match against a mob of a few hundred zombies. It is at times

like this that businesses need to be able to step in, educating scared civilians, giving

them the know-how to survive the ordeal.

Which means support teams at these business must be ready to handle the crisis.

Most businesses do not have the means, policies or infrastructure in place to take

care of even a few dozen hysteric customers reporting a sudden loss of service,

requesting sales information, or even having trouble finding their way at the same

time.

The problem with customer support is, no matter how trivial an issue seems to your

customer, finding out how to reset their password RIGHT NOW could mean the

difference between life and death. Quite literally, in fact, if they are being chased

by hungry zombies. That means no matter how high the pressure is, giving your

customers the right solution to their problem every time is

your biggest retention strategy.

“If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse,

you’ll be prepared for all hazards”, Dave Daigle,

CDC.

H o w c a n y o u p r e p a r e y o u r

s u p p o r t t e a m f o r t h e z o m b i e

a p o c a l y p s e ?

Since a zombie apocalypse can come up real fast, and with little warning, it is important

for you and your support team to have your emergency response mechanisms in place

well in advance.

Gather your resources

A lot of times your customers would rather go out and try to solve their problem

themselves, if only they knew how to. When they are being chased by a 6 foot zombie,

it really helps if you can tell them what to do and where to hide, right from your self-

service portal. For the more heroic ones, you might even want to add a few pointers on

how to re-kill the undead.

Your support team needs to have all these resources ready in your knowledge base

before the zombies come crawling out.

Zombies

News

Identify what’s critical and what’s not

If you already knew exactly what kind of information your customers look

for in your support portals, you can design a self-service experience that will

reduce your support load and still save some lives.

Do they need more help in “finding the right shelter” and “zombie-proofing

their homes”, or do they need tips on how to get rid of them altogether?

To give your customers the perfect self-service experience, you need to be

able to identify exactly what kind of information they seek, and which articles

they engage with the most in your knowledge base and community forums.

When it comes to websites, tools like Google Analytics offer an excellent

way to track activity. Webmasters know where visitors are coming from, and

which pages engage visitors the most. Integrating a similar tool with your

support portal can shed deep insights into what your customers really want.

C a u t i o n z o m b i e o u t b r e a k

It might be a good idea to have both permanent solutions as well as quick-fixes and

workarounds in your knowledge base. Your customer might not have the tools to

get rid of a zombie altogether, but the few seconds they get by maiming it could

save their lives.

Get your support team zombie-ready, before the full moon

No matter how much knowledge you share in your self-service portal, your support

desk is still going to be overloaded with queries from scared and confused

customers when the living dead start walking. Having a zombie-management

workflow can not only make sure that you handle the apocalypse like a pro, but also

give you a little more breathing space while you are at it!

#1 Put the right limb in the right bucket.

Despite zombies being clumsy, and stereotypical (and a bit dirty, with all that blood),

unless you know exactly where the trouble is coming from, getting rid of them can be

incredibly hard. Followers and hunters have identified more than two dozen kinds of

zombies typified through extant literature.

But in most cases, the first level of identifying the zombie (and how to get away from it)

is knowing whether it is the infectious type, that spreads around from victim to victim,

or the more subtle “eat brain and leave” kind.

Within each of these categories, you might have a dozen or more sub-categories. For

example, the Viral Zombie, that spreads the virus around with its bite, and the Toxic Gas

induced Zombie that releases some creepy cold smoke to turn its victims into zombies

are infectious. The ones running around because of a radiation exposure gone wrong

usually lack the ability (or charm) to convert their victims.

As a third level, you might want to add where the zombies came from. Toxic Gas

Zombies, in most cases, rise from marshes and cemeteries, and if you have a

Radiation Zombie you can be pretty sure that there is either a military research

lab or a defunct weapons testing site nearby.

Zombie

Infectious

Viral Frankenstein’s

Monster

Radiation Desk

Zombie

Subtle

“In the heat of the night you can’t afford to waste precious hours trying to figure out

what kind of zombie is troubling your customers. Dependent Fields in Freshdesk let

you bucket every support ticket into the specific categories, sub-categories and items

affected. That way you get to know exactly where the issue is coming from and get to

hit the nail right on the zombie’s empty head.”

#2 Keep an eye on every customer and issue.

During the apocalypse, you are going to have more than a few dozen customers

hitting your help desk for support. As you are answering their queries, it is really useful

to know which customers are trying to flee the scene, which ones are in hiding, and

which ones are brawling with five zombies and a baseball bat.

If you plan to do this manually, pretty soon you are going to get overwhelmed, and not

able to do your best to your customers in distress. Luckily you can mark the status of

a customer’s issue, and quickly filter, come back or even automate some tasks based

on the status.

Most help desk solutions offer out-of-the-box ticket statuses like “Open”, “Pending”,

“Resolved” and “Closed”. While that works out pretty ok in most situations, to really be

able to help your customers survive the night you might need to add your own

customized ticket statuses. With Freshdesk you can even take it beyond that, and

choose when your SLA timers must be running, and when they should be put “on-

hold”. That way, you don’t run an SLA violation when a customer is waiting for her brave

boyfriend to return from the brawl!

Keep your support team in touch, even on-the-go

It’s going to be a long night, and some of your support staff may need to be off their

desks and laptops. And it is even more critical for your on-the-field agents to be able to

stay in touch with your support desk through the night. Configuring email notifications

to alert your agents when a ticket is assigned to them can go a long way in keeping

them productive on-the-go.

With Freshdesk you can take it even a step further, and let your agents completely

“talk” to your help desk without leaving their email. Email Commands let them reassign

tickets, categorize them, change the priority or even set the status without having to

login to your support desk.

#3 Figure out what’s important and what’s not.

During the apocalypse, your help desk is going to get overloaded with a wide variety

of issues, from both customers desperately trying to survive, as well as paranoid

customers who are just looking for some information.

If your support team is not equipped with the visibility to prioritize and handle issues

accordingly, they might end up spending hours pacifying someone that her dog is not

really a zombie, when another customer “on the run” is desperately in need of some

support.

In Freshdesk, you can define the kind of service levels that your customers can expect

from your support team, based on the priority of issues they raise. For example, you

might want to guarantee that high priority issues would get responded to within an

hour, and would get resolved in four hours, while a low priority issue might take upto

three hours to get a response, and eight to get resolved. You get to decide which kinds

of issues constitute a high priority situation, and can even automate the entire prioriti-

zation process.

Issue Priority

Chased by over 5 zombies Urgent

High

Medium

Low

Brawling with 1-4 zombies

On the hide, and temporarily safe

Paranoid caller in a non-zombie area

A good way to prioritize incoming issues is by using an “Impact - Urgency” Matrix. In

this case, you might define a situation as “high impact” if the customer is faced with

5 or more zombies. Similarly, if the customer is in hiding, and temporarily safe from

attack, the urgency is lower than if the customer were currently in a brawl with them.

High Impact Low Impact

High Urgency In a brawl, with over 5 zombies Hiding and Surrounded

Low Urgency Hiding, and it’s ALMOST daylight Miles away from the

zombie zone

#4 Let robots fight zombies with intelligent automations.

With limited resources, every help desk agent on your team must be at their peak

productivity to manage and support all the distress calls and queries. But a majority of

your team’s efforts are spent in reading through every incoming ticket, categorizing,

prioritizing and assigning it to the right agent in your support desk.

In addition to that, you would have a lot of queries that need some following up with the

customer. Your agents could make a mental note to remember each of these issues,

go back and manually send your customers a reminder email to get their updates, but

that’s going to rob you and your customers of a few precious minutes.

Freshdesk comes with a number of powerful zombie-fighting automations. For

example, the Dispatch’r reads through all your incoming emails and performs a variety

of actions based on it. Like setting categories, tags and priorities, shooting automated

emails to the customer, or to specific agents, and even assigning it to the right person

in your team.

Or the Supervisor, for instance, lets you automatically send your customers a

reminder email requesting their response every few hours, or make sure your support

team doesn’t add to their agony by dragging conversations back-and-forth for too long.

To be really effective in helping your customers fight off the zombies, you need to be

able to run everything else on autopilot. The hours you save automatically

dispatching and supervising support tickets could mean the difference between “

being human” and “turning zombie” for your customer.

Sometimes you might need to run a series of tasks while working on a ticket. For

example, you might want to tag a ticket from a customer who is hailing bullets and

cutting down the undead as a “Zombie Hunter”, assign it to the “Rapid Response

Team”, and shoot an email to the guys at the ammo department requesting for the

“Ultimate Zombie Weapon”. With Freshdesk, you can run all these tasks with the click

of a single button, using Scenario Automations.

A few quick tips to take advantage of the powerful automations in Freshdesk

• Use the Dispatch’r to automatically categorize, prioritize and assign incoming

tickets

• Set up rules to periodically remind customers, if you are waiting for their inputs

• Proactively mitigate customer frustrations when conversations keep going back

and forth

• Reuse common and typical answers with Canned Responses

• Execute a series of tasks in one click, with Scenario Automations

• Save thinking time, by allowing Freshdesk to suggest the most probable solutions

to a support issue, from your knowledge base.

When the zombies strike, get everyone to pitch in

Through the night, you are going to get a lot of panic-stricken calls from customers

fleeing for their brains. To be able to scale up and match the inflow, you are going to

need every person you possibly can to jump in and support customers. That’s why it

makes sense to keep your entire organization, even the non-support staff, trained to

be able to help out during an emergency.

In most situations, it does not make sense for you to get an extra full-time agent licence

(even if you use a super-affordable monthly-pay-as-you-go support solution like

Freshdesk), just to be able to support customers for one night.

With Freshdesk, you can add as many occasional agents as your team needs, and give

them all the help desk capabilities that the rest of your support agents enjoy, by getting

them a Day Pass. As an occasional agent, pretty much anyone in your company gets

to jump in and support customers, add knowledge base articles, and contribute in your

forums for the whole day, for as low as a dollar.

#5 Open your support gates, no matter where customers are

crying for help.

It’s the zombie apocalypse, remember? Let’s get a little realistic here - you don’t expect

every frightened customer to come knocking at your support through email or your

web portal, do you? No. Most of them would be live-tweeting their crisis or sharing their

story on Facebook. As a proactive customer support team, you need to be able to be

there, no matter where they are screaming for help.

That’s why you need to have a multichannel help desk solution that lets you support

customers when they contact you, through phone, email or your support portal, and

even when they aren’t contacting you, but need your help on Facebook and Twitter.

With Freshdesk, you can take your customer support beyond just waiting for custom-

ers to complain and firefight issues. When customers aren’t talking to you but are talk-

ing about you on their favorite social networks, you can be there, answer their queries,

and show the world that you are a company that cares!

#6 Give survivors and Zombie Hunters the platform to engage

and learn from each other.

The last few humans need to be able to get

together, organize their civilian armies and work

on the advice of successful zombie hunters.

With community forums, you can provide them

with the right platform to engage with each

other, ask questions, get tips and tricks, and

report zombie sightings.

“With the integrated community forums in

Freshdesk your customers can talk to each

other, suggest ideas, and vote on existing

suggestions. That way, your customers get to

share best-practices with each other, and fall

even more deeply in love with your brand. Or,

in the case of a zombie apocalypse, stay alive

and coming back to you.”

Community rock-stars will be able to share

their experiences with other

survivors, answer questions and discuss the

best ways to get rid of the brain-eating undead.

And you can participate in these discussions

and get even closer to your customers.

Is your support team apocalypse proof? Here’s a handy

checklist -

Get the team prepped up

Update your knowledge base with latest information

Identify issue-priority matrix for your business

Have occasional agent logins ready for non-support staff

Keep the support portal ready

Customize ticket forms to get all relevant information the first time

Create separate forums for discussions, tips, ideas and questions

Monitor self-service portal activity and engagement through analytics

Go all out

Integrate social media into core support channels

Automate ticket categorization and dispatch

Bucket and drill-down issues with dependent fields

Build on the heroes

Identify active contributors in the forums

Participate and answer community discussions

Motivate customers to use your support portal

What do the reports say? A few numbers you need to worry

about -

Metric Reason

First Response Time

Resolution Time

Overdue tickets

Time spent and articles per visit

(by customers) in Support Portal

Forum activity (number of posts

and replies)

Tickets/customer

Customer satisfaction levels

The least customers expect when running from a

Zombie, is a response. Try to keep it low

Your customers need solutions, not comforting.

Faster resolution times correlate to happier

customers who keep coming back.

Customers need the answer NOW. Make sure

you don’t carry around yesterday’s baggage into

the apocalypse.

The more engaged customers are in your self

service portal, the better they can help

themselves during the apocalypse.

If customers participate in your communities,

your brand and zombie survival skills are always

top-of-mind.

If customers keep coming back to your support

they probably like your product and service. But

don’t push it too hard. Try and keep it optimal

Finally, data shows that happier customers are

able to fend off zombies (and dementors) bet-

ter. Keep your customer satisfaction levels super

high.

Ready for non-zombie days too...

With a few simple things that you can make a part of your support culture, your help

desk will be ready for pretty much anything. A zombie apocalypse may not be

something that comes up every day (or night). But a few other common scenarios

could turn apocalyptic real fast too.

Perhaps the store announced a new

sale, and customers are thronging

at your doors, or one of your

vendors ran a little glitch and

customers now want their refunds.

Or, perhaps, just the volume of

innocent questions is smothering

your team with more tickets than

they can handle.

If your support team is ready to

handle calls during the final standoff

between humans and zombies, they

can handle anything!

References:

http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Types_of_Zombies

http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Zombie_Killing

http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-

apocalypse/

http://www.gunsandammo.com/2012/04/19/the-ultimate-zombie-gun-red-jacket-

zk-22-bullpup-rifle/

R I PZombie

Freshdesk is a cloud-based social customer support software used by over 1000

businesses every day to win the love of their customers. With a full-service help

desk, complete with robust ticketing, powerful automations, multi-channel support

capabilities, knowledge base, and integrated community forums, Freshdesk allows

businesses to take their support to customers wherever they are.

Check us out at www.freshdesk.com

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Just send us a mail at love@freshdesk.com

Or Call us at +1 (877) 485-0317

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