5 ways automation can help your customer support team

Customer support is a tough job—and making sure your customers are taken care of without burning out your support team is even tougher. Whether it’s keeping the team on target, handing off customers to other teams, or just maintaining ticket hygiene, the tasks can quickly pile up and often lead to points of friction or wasted effort. 

Luckily, many of these tasks can be automated to help you stay on top of tickets, get your customers the help they need, and keep your team healthy and growing. We’ve collected some popular Zaps (our name for Zapier’s automated workflows) that help keep your customer support team running smoothly. 

Table of contents

• Create tickets from forms

• Route tickets to the proper channels

• Notify your team about new tickets

• Maintain ticket hygiene

• Keep an eye on the numbers

Create tickets from forms

Questions can come from anywhere, and—because you're the Steven Tyler of support—you don't want to miss a thing. 

With these Zaps, you can turn new form submissions into tickets so your team can assist customers right away.

Does your business use a custom website form for customer support? You can connect your ticketing platform to your web form with Webhooks by Zapier. It's a built-in tool, available on paid Zapier plans, that lets you use webhooks within Zaps.  

Get started with these workflows:

Route tickets to the proper channels

If your customers can't find your support form, they'll find other ways—whether it's emailing an employee or using your marketing chatbot. 

These Zaps will route your customers to the right place:

If you frequently reroute emails to your ticketing channels, you can also use our Email Parser tool to extract relevant information to include in tickets. 

On the other hand, you might receive a ticket that another team needs to handle, such as communicating a bug to your engineering team or pointing a customer to sales. 

Use these workflows for a seamless handoff—and happier customers:

Notify your team about new tickets

Support doesn't always happen in just one app—your team might be putting out fires in multiple places, or building documentation to help answer even more questions in the future. To make sure a ticket never gets lost, use the Zaps below to notify your team about new tickets in your company's team chat app, which they most likely always have open.

Maintain ticket hygiene

Things can get disorganized fast if you're managing a high volume of support requests. Automating best practices for processes like tagging certain tickets or documenting solutions can relieve the burden for your team—especially if there's a sudden influx of tickets. 

These workflows can create recurring tickets, move requests to the proper place, and document activity in your internal knowledge base.

Keep an eye on the numbers

While putting a number score on how much"help" your team is providing can sound harsh, it can be a tool for transparency, and let each member of the team know how they're doing in a more tangible way than just "good."

Most customer service apps have built-in metric trackers, but sometimes you need more customization for your metric tracking. These Zaps will send tickets to a spreadsheet or database so you can do your own calculations. 

Support your customer support team with automation

Your customer support team keeps your customers happy, so take care of them too. Automation with Zapier helps ease the demands on your support crew, so they can focus on providing excellent customer service. 

This article was originally published in January 2021, written by Tyler Robertson. It was most recently updated in April 2023 by Krystina Martinez.