Zendesk Onboarding: A step-by-step guide for creating client and employee onboarding.

Are you tired of manually managing the onboarding process for your customers or new hires? Do you wish there was an easier way to keep track of all the tasks involved in the onboarding process? If you're using Zendesk, you're in luck! With Zendesk + SweetHawk, you can create an onboarding process flow for clients & new hires alike, that will help you streamline your process and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Here's how to create an onboarding process flow in Zendesk with SweetHawk:

Step 1: Design the flow. 

Create a list of all of the tasks that need to take place as part of your one onboarding flow. For each of the tasks, decide who will be doing them. If you have tasks that need to be divvied out to different team members, decide what those tasks will be.

Step 2: Create the first task list.

Now, with the use of the SweetHawk Tasks app you can create the main onboarding task list. You can do this by going into the Tasks app and clicking on ‘Add Task List’ at the top right of the ‘Task lists’ section. Give your task list a name, such as ‘Onboarding,’ and add any tasks that are part of your onboarding process. This might include things like ‘Send Welcome Email,’ ‘Schedule Onboarding Call,’ ‘Create User Accounts,’ and ‘Provide Training Materials’. 

Step 3: Create ticket templates. 

If some of your tasks need to be divided out to other team members, you can automatically spin up sub-tickets as part of your task list that are assigned to the right people/department. To do this, for each sub-ticket you can create the template that defines the ticket details such as who it’s going to be assigned to. To create a template, in the ‘Ticket templates’ part of the Tasks app, at the top right, click on ‘Add ticket template’. 

Now you can fill out all of the details of the template just as if you were filling out the details of a regular ticket. For every field you can even set it to copy information from the parent ticket. 

Step 4: Assign templates to tasks.

Once you have your ticket template, you can go back to your main task list that you created in Step 2 and for each of the tasks you can click into them and specify which template will be used to create a sub-ticket automatically. 

Step 5: Automate task lists. 

If you now want these tasks and sub-tickets to be applied automatically on a ticket you can do so using a Zendesk trigger. 

To do this, first click into the settings of the task list and set it to be ‘automatic’. 

Now on the main task list screen, click to ‘Create trigger’. 

Click into the trigger and change the rules to fire when you want it to, for example, when the ticket is created and the ‘Onboarding’ form is selected. 

Step 6: Test out your flow. 

Now that everything has been setup. You should create a test ticket and either apply the task list manually or set the ticket with the conditions that match the trigger that it will automatically be applied on. 

Sweet! You’re now ready to start using your new streamlined onboarding process which will ensure that things stop falling between the cracks and provide a consistent onboarding experience for your customers or employees. 

Other things you may want to consider as part of your onboarding flow: 

Time: 

You may want to track time or put workflow in place to ensure your onboarding process happens within an expected amount of time. You can do this using the SweetHawk Timers app. 

Approvals:

Some of your tasks may need approval before they can be completed. For enforceable, flexible and auditable approvals you can use the SweetHawk Approve app. 

Scheduling:

If things need to be scheduled at certain times with specific teams or team members, the Calendar app can help here. It’s ability to allow you to attach calendar events to tickets and even sync them with Google calendar and Office365 will have you planning more effectively.

Reporting: 

You may wish to be able to see who has what tickets assigned to them, visualise the status of any particular flow or track how many onboarding flows that have been completed in a specified period of time. For this, you can either build Zendesk Views to slice your tickets in real time, alternatively you can use Zendesk Explore to build complex reports that slice and dice all your onboarding tickets and information however you like. 

The SweetHawk Super Suite

The SweetHawk Super Suite combines all of the SweetHawk apps in to one, high value package to cater for a raft of use cases including employee experience, ITSM change management, project management, client onboarding, SLA workflows and reporting, surveys and so much more.