Carpets worn through from dancing feet.

Nico B. Boyce, Deltastring founder

Your business probably doesn't have a unique, irreplaceable proposition for your customers. It's unlikely that they couldn't find the same outcome elsewhere.

Here's an example fresh in my mind. I just had a call with a contact at Salto.io who are a great configuration management product. They are working on features to connect to your Salto instance from your AI assistant so you can make changes in your Zendesk (and other platforms) and that's great. Salto was being wound down but now has some new life and I'm glad we're going to have some serious competition to be the best config management platform. Good luck to them!

Some years ago I had another business operating pubs, restaurants, events. What is the main draw of the pub? You can get beer in the supermarket, that's not what anybody is really paying for when they go to the pub. The value of the pub is the time in the environment. Whatever your company sells, is needing that category of product ever the reason the customers choose you?

I was a competitive bar owner, because I know I can be the best at whatever I choose to do and at that time it was running bars, whereas today it's Zendesk configuration management. My venues won pub of the year awards in their cities a few times. You don't win that because you have the perfect temperature and gas pressure for your Guinness (though you do have to get that right!) but instead because you have taken an unloved building with scruffy carpets and turned it into a place where people know they can always find a good time. Consistency matters.

You need to at least meet the customer expectations. With a pub that's difficult because so many things are outside of your control! But the prior expectation is the single biggest component of how people feel about the outcome. It's the same in the support world. Getting bad CSAT? You didn't meet the expectations! The largest component of that is usually the speed of response. You know there's free CSAT available if you weight your SLA times per ticket category according to CSAT outcomes and tune those over a couple of months, usually a few percent. I digress.

You sell a product, but you are rated on the whole experience. A customer with a complaint is praising you, they trust you to be there and lead them through this to a good outcome. Repeat business isn't only based on the quality of the product or service but the whole cycle. We all know this to be true. I liked to thank an unhappy customer to the point where they were embarrassed to have raised the issue and would themselves apologise! I am so grateful to have the chance to improve, to solve this for the next person, to put this right for you here now. We know what the reverse looks like. There are restaurants where I love the food but the staff are terrible. Wouldn't have happened in my businesses. I'll eat elsewhere next time. I'm not here because I'm hungry and can't otherwise acquire food. Are your customers starved of your product, or do they expect more?

What's the Deltastring MCP excitement?

The Deltastring MCP is not a Zendesk MCP. It doesn't sit as a simple translation layer in front of the Zendesk API. Your changes are staged in the Deltastring platform and checked against your dependencies before anything happens. Will this break other workflows? Deltastring will let you know! Additionally changes follow the processes you've set. Some businesses require another team member to approve a production change. Deltastring handles that! The goal is to make building and maintaining with proper processes easier than just bashing new stuff in via the Zendesk admin centre.

The other half of it is what your assistant knows. The MCP gives it the detail of how Zendesk objects work, plus Zendesk best practices (worry no more about trigger ordering or automation timing) and a conventions layer you configure for your business: how you name your tags, the way you design your processes. There are dozens of defaults in there we've set and you can drop and swap any of them.

Using your assistant rather than an AI sitting inside our platform, you keep your own context. Got documents on your branding and tone of voice, your processes, the things you have locally but wouldn't want to load into someone else's AI? Maybe you have a Jira board where your Zendesk config tasks are planned? Your AI can work from that with our MCP. Learn more about the Deltastring MCP here and get in touch with your questions!

Great things from other good people

I tried out this new Zendesk Help Center theme builder from our friends at Pythia and it's a nice piece of kit! Well worth a try if you're thinking of refreshing your HC theme.

Stuck with a frustrating problem? Try the Backward Chain Diagnostic Framework from Sarah Betts. We all get plenty of these newsletters. Things we signed up to and forgot about but they pop up now and again and we swipe them away. Friends who we want to support so we stay on their mailing list. I see you and appreciate it. Betts' pieces are always the best email of the day.

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