Zendesk Architect to Audit and Redesign Our Customer Support Setup

Zendesk Architect to Audit and Redesign Our Customer Support Setup We are a Danish SaaS company providing a loyalty and point-of-sale platform to merchants. We have moved our customer support into Zendesk Suite, but the initial setup was done in-house and does not yet support the way we need to work. We are looking for an experienced Zendesk architect to review our current configuration, design the right setup, and implement it. The goal: every issue a merchant raises, through any channel, is captured as a ticket, has an owner, is followed through, and gets an answer. The ticket data should also show us recurring problems so we can improve our product. OUR CURRENT SETUP - Zendesk Suite, used by our customer support team and technical staff - Email: merchants contact us by email; tickets are not yet created automatically from every inbox - Phone: calls come in through Twilio, where we have built a custom IVR that is not yet tested, and through some mobile lines with no link to Zendesk - Engineering: a GitHub integration is installed for escalating technical issues - History: past merchant interactions have been migrated into Zendesk from our previous internal tool - Merchant data: our merchant list lives in a MySQL data warehouse and is currently uploaded to Zendesk by CSV. Merchants are identified by their Danish company number (CVR) - Reporting: management reporting runs in Power BI on the same warehouse - Process: two triage owners create, prioritise and assign tickets; the assignee owns resolution; one person is accountable for the overall process MILESTONES (fixed price, paid on acceptance of each) Milestone 1: Audit and target design Review our configuration: channels, groups, roles, fields and forms, views, triggers, automations, SLA policies, macros, integrations and migrated data. Deliver a short report of what to change and a target design for milestones 2 to 5. Milestone 2: Channels and merchant data - Every support email and phone call creates a ticket automatically - Review our Twilio IVR and recommend whether to keep, extend or replace it; calls carry the recording and are matched to the merchant by phone number - Merchants as Zendesk organizations keyed on CVR, with contacts as users, synced automatically from our MySQL warehouse to replace the CSV upload Milestone 3: Ticket structure and workflow - Forms and required fields (category, product area, priority) and custom statuses such as "waiting on engineering" - Triage queue for new and unassigned tickets, SLA policies, automations that flag unassigned and stale tickets, and an escalation path when reminders are ignored - No ticket solved without a reply to the merchant; macros for common replies Milestone 4: Engineering link and reporting - Escalated tickets linked to GitHub issues, with the agent notified when the issue is closed - Explore dashboards for day-to-day management, and a recommended way to get ticket data into our warehouse through the API using OAuth Milestone 5: Handover and support - Written configuration documentation - Training session for the support team and an admin walkthrough - Two weeks of post-launch support to fix issues REQUIRED SKILLS - Proven experience designing and configuring Zendesk Support or Suite for B2B companies - Deep knowledge of triggers, automations, SLA policies, views, custom statuses and Explore - Zendesk API experience, including OAuth (Zendesk is retiring API tokens) - Integrating a phone system with Zendesk, ideally Twilio - Integrating Zendesk with external systems such as GitHub or a database - Clear written English and good documentation Nice to have: Zendesk administrator certification, SaaS or point-of-sale support experience, Danish language, experience with GDPR-sensitive data. TERMS - Fixed price per milestone; please quote a price and duration for each of the five milestones - We want to start this week; please state your earliest start date - Some daily overlap with Central European Time for calls - NDA and GDPR-compliant handling of merchant data required SCREENING QUESTIONS 1. Describe a Zendesk setup you designed for a B2B company: channels, number of agents, and what you would do differently today. 2. How would you make sure no ticket stays unassigned and no merchant goes without a reply? 3. How have you connected a phone system other than Zendesk Talk, such as Twilio, to Zendesk? 4. How would you keep Zendesk organizations in sync with an external database? 5. How would you link tickets to GitHub issues so the agent knows when engineering has closed the issue? 6. What would you need from us in the first week?

HOW TO APPLY

Answer the screening questions, quote a price and duration per milestone, and share one or two examples of similar work. Start your proposal with the word "Merchant" so we know you have read the full post.