Create a Frictionless Self-Service Support Experience with Higher Logic Vanilla’s Zendesk Integration

Customers expect nothing short of a seamless support experience, no matter how they reach out. They want timely, consistent, and effective help that resolves their issues swiftly and reinforces their trust in your brand. However, meeting these high expectations goes beyond quick fixes; it requires creating a cohesive support ecosystem that assures customers they’re valued and understood at every touchpoint.

Enter Higher Logic Vanilla’s Zendesk integration. This powerful solution brings together your online community and customer support channels, streamlining your processes and making sure your customers get the help they need, exactly when they need it. By unifying your support system, you can provide a more connected, responsive, and personalized experience that keeps your customers happy and coming back.

Are You a Good Fit for This Integration?

Higher Logic Vanilla’s Zendesk integration is designed to address common challenges faced by support teams and community managers. If you recognize these challenges within your organization, this integration could be a perfect fit for you:

• Information silos: Customers struggle to find what they need quickly because they have to search multiple places, leading to repeated queries and unnecessary back-and-forth.
• Fragmented experiences: Jumping from platform to platform or relaying information through multiple people to handle customer issues is inefficient and leads to a disjointed customer experience.
• Delayed response times for critical issues: Important community posts sometimes fall through the cracks or take too long to escalate, frustrating customers and eroding trust in your support.
• Underused community contributions: Valuable insights and information shared in the community often don’t make it into your official support documentation. You’re sitting on a goldmine of useful content that could help many users, but it’s just not being used.
• High volume of repetitive support tickets: Your support team is bogged down by repetitive questions, leaving them little room to tackle the bigger, more complex issues. This constant influx of basic questions slows down response times and impacts customer satisfaction.

By addressing these challenges, our Zendesk integration brings a host of benefits to your support operations. But what does this actually look like in practice? Let’s explore some key capabilities that demonstrate the impact of this seamless connection.

Creating a Seamless Customer Support Experience with Higher Logic Vanilla’s Zendesk Integration

Watch our short demo video or browse the features below to get an in-depth look at how Higher Logic Vanilla’s Zendesk integration can enhance your customer support experience.

 

CROSS-PLATFORM SEARCH AND VANILLA-ZENDESK SSO

Let users quickly find relevant information across both platforms.

Enhance your Vanilla community’s search capabilities by integrating content from one or more Zendesk Guides. Users can access information from both platforms in a single search, with results organized in separate tabs.

Plus, with single sign-on (SSO), users can seamlessly navigate between community discussions and private Zendesk support tickets without needing separate logins or an Identity Provider (IdP), ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted experience.

 

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD & ONE-CLICK TICKET CREATION

Manage and escalate community posts from one dashboard.

Manage all community posts from a single, intuitive dashboard. Admins can assign posts to moderators or escalate them to Zendesk with a single click. Optional user permissions can be configured for:

• Ticket visibility: Allow users to see if a post has an associated Zendesk ticket and view basic ticket details. This transparency builds trust and keeps the community informed about issue statuses and progress.
• Self-service escalation: Empower users to escalate their own posts to Zendesk after a configurable delay period. Admins can set a wait time before users can escalate posts to Zendesk, ensuring posts get adequate visibility in the community. This prioritizes engagement while still providing a clear path for further assistance if needed.

Escalating a community post to Zendesk from Higher Logic Vanilla’s Community Management Dashboard

 

AUTOMATED ESCALATION WORKFLOWS

Automatically escalate community posts to Zendesk based on keywords, user sentiment, and inactivity.

Automatically escalate posts to the community management dashboard or Zendesk based on specific criteria. Set triggers for posts containing certain keywords, lacking comments or activity for a defined period, or receiving a certain number of reports.

Additionally, posts can be automatically escalated based on user sentiment. Set thresholds for sentiment level, ensuring only the most critical issues get immediate attention.

For added control, combine sentiment analysis with keyword filtering to monitor the sentiment of specific keywords within a post. Even if the overall sentiment of a post isn’t enough to trigger an escalation, any mention of a flagged keyword will ensure it gets escalated.

Setting up an automated workflow using Higher Logic Vanilla’s Automation Rules to escalate a community posts to Zendesk based on its sentiment. 

 

TWO-WAY PLATFORM SYNC

Monitor Zendesk ticket statuses for escalated posts directly within your community.

Track support ticket statuses across both platforms. When a community post is escalated to Zendesk, its status can be monitored directly within the Vanilla community. Updates in Zendesk, such as an agent closing the ticket or marking it as in progress, are automatically reflected in the community. This way, community managers and support agents can stay on the same page without having to switch between different platforms.

For added transparency, admins can make the status of an escalated post visible to the end user, keeping them updated on the progress.

Support agents can also respond to community posts directly from Zendesk. By using the #communityreply tag, any reply to a Zendesk ticket—whether it’s a request for more information or a status update—automatically posts back to the thread it originated from in Vanilla.

Viewing the status of a community post in Higher Logic Vanilla that’s been escalated to Zendesk.

 

POST-TO-ARTICLE CREATOR

Convert helpful community posts into Zendesk Guide articles.

Create draft articles in your Zendesk Guide right from a community post, using that post as the basis of the article. This simplifies the content creation process and gets helpful information published sooner. You can edit new articles right in the Zendesk editor, tweaking formatting and punctuation to match your style.

Converting a community post into a draft Zendesk Guide article.

 

AI-SUGGESTED ANSWERS

Instantly provide users with AI-suggested answers while they await community responses.

Reduce support tickets with Vanilla’s new AI assistant. When a user posts a question in the community, the AI assistant immediately searches through existing community discussions and the Zendesk knowledge base to find the most relevant answers while the user waits for a response from fellow members.

If the user finds the suggested content helpful, they can accept it as the answer, making it visible to everyone who visits the discussion. Each answer includes a link to the original source, ensuring other users can quickly find the information they need.

 

Experience the power of integrated customer support and community management with Higher Logic Vanilla and Zendesk.

Get a personalized demo to see the integration in action.