#1 Rebrand the account to reflect your company's identity with logo, custom portal name, and domain mapping. You can also enable multi-branding if you need to maintain separate Help Centers for different brands or products of your organization.

Your portal name is a unique identifier for each Zoho Desk account. It's usually the company name that was entered during the signup. However, you can customize it at this point. The default support email address will also use the portal name. For example, if the portal name is 'zylkerdesigns', then the support email address would be support@zylkerdesigns.zohodesk.com. Similarly, your default Help Center will also have the portal name: www.zylkerdesigns.zohodesk.com/portal. This URL can also be customized by mapping the organization's domain to it, such as www.support.zylkerdesigns.com.

#2 Plan and create departments based on teams, products, or even geographical locations. Every department can have its own identity with a separate set of automations, workflows, agent access, multiple channels to collect tickets, and much more.

#3 Add the organization's work hours and mark the holidays so that the system knows when an agent is available to take up tickets and tasks. It also helps to automatically assign tickets to the available agents, escalate tickets, or calculate the due time.

#4 Setting up the email channel is one of the first things you need to complete, as emails are the most widely used means of communication in business. You can set up other channels later, including community, chat, web form, and social media.

#5 Setting up the Help Center requires you to customize it according to your brand and organization's theme. First, choose one from the list of available themes and start with some basic customizations. You can perform advanced customizations according to the brand's choice by using the HTML and CSS options. You can also add default and custom widgets to display more information to users who browse through your help center.

#6 Customize the fields and modules as soon as possible. Once you make a list of the data that you collect and store, you can add new fields, edit the existing fields, mark them mandatory where required, or place them under relevant sections. When you import your data, you will have the layout ready to which the data needs to be added.

#7 Defining roles and profiles is essential before onboarding your agents as users in your company's Desk account. Roles define the data that one can access, while profiles define the feature access for individuals. Similarly, data-sharing rules add an extra layer of security if you set the org-wide default permissions for the various modules. Once this is set up, onboard your teams and agents. As you add individuals, assign them the relevant role and profile that you already created. Furthermore, the offline support teams can be replicated in your Desk account by grouping them into Teams, which are useful in ticket assignment automations, workflow configurations and more.

#8 Enabling the notification rules that Desk provides can help you stay on top of all your tasks. It can be quite handy to get notified of the new responses to a ticket, or be informed of any calls and tasks that are assigned via email or text message. Your contacts can also receive specific notifications if you enable them, such as when a comment is added to their ticket, when it is edited, or when a ticket is closed. Similarly, you also need to keep track of what your customers think of the support they receive. Enabling customer ratings in Desk is a great way to collect the feedback and take action accordingly to improve your service.

#9 Configuring some basic and essential automations can make sure things are in place right from the beginning. You can begin with the assignment rules, which are important to automate assignment of tickets to agents and teams. You can also set up the round robin model, if that works for your organization. Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, are also quite useful when set up in the beginning, as this will define the process that you follow for response time, resolution time, escalations, and ticket reassignment. Building customer support workflow could be your next step. From the many processes that your organization has, you can identify the important ones that can be best followed when implemented as an automated workflow rule. For example, when a customer responds to your email with feedback, or when you have certain steps to be followed for a high priority support service.

#10 Importing your data is the final step when your Desk account is all set up. Start supporting your customers right away by importing support tickets, contacts, customer accounts, knowledge base articles, products, calls, events, and tasks.

There is much more for you to discover in your Desk account, as we have a whole array of features for customer service and support. Based on the edition that you have subscribed to, you can implement them as you go.