Revolutionize Customer Support Efforts with Zendesk And Raygun

By Nick Harley | Posted Aug 12, 2016 | 5 min. (856 words)

We can all relate to receiving a support request from a frustrated customer who has a technical issue with your website or mobile app. If you want to save your bottom line, you have to address the more serious issues quickly and efficiently. You need to know what happened and when so you can continue to provide excellent customer service – and the first port of call is your development team.

Often, a helpful developer comes to your aid to find and fix the the issue fast – before you lose a customer. The truth is, fixing bugs is an unenjoyable job for most software teams. This often creates a poor communication pathway between customer service teams and developers – ultimately leaving the most important person in the dark (the customer).

Here are the usual reasons you may find this process tends to become frustrating for both sides:

These are common enough issues for any customer support team, but below I’m going to show you how to solve this issue once and for all and make developers actually love solving software bugs.

Yes, believe it or not, this process can revolutionize your companies customer support efforts, and make your team more productive.

What if you could hand over the email address of the user that has experienced a bug or technical problem to the development team? They’d get the full diagnostic information they need about that specific error and fix it in under 30 seconds.

This is how Zendesk and Raygun Crash Reporting work together to help your teams communicate more efficiently. 

Raygun is an error and crash reporting software that automatically detects issues and bugs in software applications. Zendesk is an all-in-one customer support software that allows fast communication between customer support and development teams.

With Zendesk and Raygun working together, you can efficiently detect errors then communicate the progress with both your team and the customer, effectively closing the lag time between error detection and resolution.

Both Zendesk and Raygun are incredibly easy to set up. Here’s how to get them working together.

You’ll need:

Setting Up Raygun

Your developers can install Raygun into your app with just a few lines of code and start reporting bugs right away. The cool part about Raygun is it will detect all errors your customers are experiencing on any programming language and platform, whether they report them or not. Seeing as generally 1% of customers actively report software bugs, there’s a whole lot of problems that could be in your app that aren’t being monitored. But here, let’s focus on the times you receive a customer support request that a developer needs to investigate.

Within a Raygun account you can then choose to invite a developer to install the code in the application for you. (It’s probably best to team up with one of your developers for most of this process as they’ll be the ones benefiting from the information Raygun can provide.)

Once the code is installed in your application, errors are detected by Raygun and sent to your Raygun dashboard. From here you can see all the errors that are happening in the application. When you set up Raygun’s user tracking feature, you can also see who they are happening to as well. Raygun gives you the ability to see all your customers and all the issues they are experiencing! At this point you’ll probably be surprised just how many issues are happening that users aren’t bothering to report.

Each and every error occurrence has full diagnostic information included. This is gold for your developers. They get everything they need to fix the error quickly:

  • The full stack trace
  • When the issue happened
  • The operating system
  • The user’s browser

You can now set up your Zendesk integration.

Integrating Zendesk And Raygun

You can connect Raygun error groups to issues in Zendesk, or create whole new issues in Zendesk from an error group.

Here’s how to set it up: 

Now we’re ready to go.

Prioritize Fixes

When a support request comes in from customer a and you need your development team to find the issue, simply hand them the email address of the customer. They’ll be able to find exactly what happened to them with a quick search using Raygun’s ‘Users’ feature. From there, up pops that specific customer’s profile, which includes all the error that they have encountered historically. 

Your development team can now look into that specific error occurrence and view full diagnostic information. Within 30 seconds they can now see why the error occurred and prioritize a fix. They’ll also have enough time to give you a detailed response which you can simply relay to your customer via Zendesk.

Next time you are struggling to get answers from your development team, get them to give Raygun a try!

It will take them the time it takes to drink a coffee to install and the results will amaze them.

_Need help setting up Zendesk and Raygun? _

Contact one of our team members here.