Allons Enfants de Soutien à la Clientèle, Paris Meetup February 10

Join us for a drink and get to meet fellow European Zendesk customers, partners and friends. We're hosting a Meetup at the Hard Rock Café in Paris; an informal gathering to talk shop, hang out, throw some ideas around and have a few drinks. Whether you're a Zendesk customer, in the customer support biz, or just happen to be in Paris on February 10, we look very much forward to seeing you.

Join us at the Hard Rock Café, 14 Boulevard Montmartre in Paris on Wednesday February 10, from 7-10pm.

As always please RSVP on Facebook. See you in Paris!

Our Life is Frittered Away by Detail

Spudaroo.com is a new service that aims to connect you with a growing community of talented professionals who compete to deliver your small business needs. From press releases to presentations. You hold a contest for your project, and then pick the best entry.

The team behind Spudaroo.com is maintaining a blog on their experiences with building the service and the technologies and tools they employ. One of these tools is Zendesk, and in a blog post titled "Zendesk. Guaranteed to make you, well, feel zen" the team sends some good karma our way:

"I’ve played with a few support tools in my time. SalesForce, SugarCRM and Kayako amongst others. Sitting here and recalling the process for setting up email relay in any one of these solutions makes baby Jesus cry so I’m setting that memory aside."

I can't say that preventing baby Jesus from crying was a mission statement when building Zendesk, but I can say that keeping stuff beautifully simply was. The simple fact that you don't have to worry about configuring email servers when setting up your Zendesk help desk is one of these areas where we try not to fritter your life away by detail, to quote David Thoreau (again). Zendesk was built on the idea that providing great customer support should be as easy as buying a book online. Our smart product design enables companies to effortlessly get started and focus on responding quickly to the needs of their customers. And not configuring mail servers.

Anyway, check out Spudaroo.com, one of Zendesk's many thousands happy customers and a great service for busy professionals and time strapped entrepreneurs.

SnapABug Puts Support Reps in the Customer's Shoes

Zendesk provides you with a Dropbox that you can embed on your website and that gives your customers an easy and nearby way of providing you with instant feedback. Now SnapABug has taken the concept further and packed it with some useful additional features.

SnapABug cofounder and CEO Jerome Breche said SnapABug can be added to any website in a few simple steps. When a visitor hits “send” for help, SnapABug automatically captures and sends a screen shot -- so the support team can see that the customer is seeing. The widget also captures and sends additional information needed to resolve the issue quickly, such as operating system, browser, language -- even geographic location.

“Zendesk is now our most used integration,” said Jerome. “When we were considering help desk solutions, we shopped around and asked a lot of questions. All of the companies we talked to that used Zendesk said they absolutely loved the product and the service. Integrating with Zendesk was a no-brainer for us.”

“It was a fast and easy process to integrate and customize,” he said. “I particularly like Zendesk's ability to identify whether a user already exists in the system -- then the support team can view that history and other information that can further speed issue resolution.”

In addition to Zendesk's ease of use, Jerome said working with the Zendesk support team “was amazing during the integration and customization. They got back to me fast when I had a question.”

In addition of providing remote screen-captures, SnapABug also provides a solution for companies to chat in real time with their website visitors. When used with Zendesk, this solution places chat transcript directly into Zendesk, making it easier to interact and follow-up with visitors.

You can follow the instructions on how to set up the integration at SnapABug's web site and in our support forums.

Managing Customer Email Subscriptions Just Got Easier

Sound familiar? A customer contacts your support desk demanding to be removed from the company’s mailing list. Or, on the other hand, say they want to receive an email when the latest version is released.

Well, thanks to a pretty cool integration with Contactology – a provider of email marketing and online survey technologies – your help desk agents can now manage email subscriptions directly from within Zendesk.

The Contactology widget is activated by anyone who uses both Zendesk and Contactology. The process takes moments and is enabled from within the Zendesk widget manager.

Here’s how it works: While reviewing a customer support ticket, users can review the contact’s current email marketing list status via the Contactology widget. The support personnel can add (or remove) help desk customers to selected email distribution lists or opt-in to receive special offers or newsletters – again, all within Zendesk.

Zendesk users can also use Contactology to create, send and track email marketing through an intuitive web-based interface -- or integrate your own application or technology through our open source API. Check out Contactology's website for more information or to give it a free test drive.

Email Aliases, Group Views, Forwarding, More... Stay Updated on Feature Additions and Bug Fixes

If you haven't noticed already Zendesk is now rolling out a release every weekend. Most releases carry new features, additions and bug fixes. The last months have seen the addition of the following features amongst others:

Group-specific views and macros: Aside from the views that you create for everybody in your help desk, you can now create ticket views for certain groups only or let individual agents create personal views for themselves. This comes especially handy for help desk with a lot of agents.

Email aliases: We're now (finally) capable of recognizing users with multiple email addresses. If a customer responds to a ticket from another email address than the one registered in Zendesk, you can now add that email address to his profile and preserve an uninterrupted ticket thread.

Forward email to ticket: Many email clients have a 'redirect' function that allows you to redirect an email to your Zendesk help desk whilst preserving the original sender as requester. But now Zendesk also supports good old forwarding. When forwarding an email to your help desk, Zendesk will parse the email and set the requester based on the sender of the forwarded email. This feature is optional as you may not always want this behavior.

Since November we have released more than 50 updates and feature additions to Zendesk and more than 40 minor bug fixes. Keep up to date with the releases by following our Announcements forum via our support portal, RSS or email.

Tip of the Week: Using Targets to Archive a Mail Copy of Solved Tickets

Recently, we mentioned how one of our customer's enhanced their support workflow by integrating their Zendesk with their project management tool. They accomplished this by leveraging Targets within Zendesk. Targets are a very useful part of Zendesk that often goes under-utilized. In this week's Tip of the Week, we're going explain the basics of targets and show you how to set up a simple target.

Targets allow you send notifications (officially, for you developers, they allow you to execute call backs or hooks) to external systems upon ticket updates. This means you can use your Zendesk tickets to create outside announcements, reminders, tasks, etc. Let's say, for instance, you have an urgent ticket that's been unattended for 48 hours. You want to alert a support agent about this immediately. Rather than rely on an email notification, you could configure a Target to send a notification via SMS/text message. Very useful. In other words, Targets allow you to tie your help desk in with the other systems your business uses to get things done.

Zendesk comes with a number of Targets ready for you to use, including Twitter, Clickatell (for text messaging), Basecamp, Yammer, and Pivotal Tracker to name just a few. The complete list is available on our Extras Page. If your business uses any of these, just follow the steps to set them up under Account >> Targets in your Zendesk.

You can also, however, set up targets for any service that accepts incoming email (as with the LiquidPlanner integration we blogged about earlier); or any online service by configuring a custom URL target. These make the extensibility of Zendesk if not limitless, at least far-reaching.

We'll show you how to set up a basic email Target to get you started with Zendesk Targets. Let's say you wanted to archive a copy of each ticket you solve in an external email account on your company's email server. You need to send every solved ticket, in other words, to an external email target.

To set up that target, you must be logged in as an admin. Go to the Account tab and choose Target in the dropdown. Once there, choose Add Target in the upper right.

Choose "Email Target" on the next page, and fill out the form.

You can test the target to make sure you've got it set up correctly; and then choose "create target" and hit submit.

That's it! The target is created and ready to start receiving updates from your Zendesk. Note that you have to create a Trigger that defines when you want to send notifications (or, again, execute a call back). In our case, the trigger would be when a ticket is marked solved, a notification is sent to our new target:

That's just the beginning of using targets. Experiment, and let us know how you use Targets by sharing your Zenfession with us!

Using Triggers & Targets to Integrate with Project Management Tool LiquidPlanner

Harte-Hanks, a Global Sales & Marketing Service Provider, recently took charge of its support workflow in Europe by tying together Zendesk with LiquidPlanner, an online project management tool. Harte-Hanks supports and services clients all over the globe from offices around the world. The company needed a flexible yet highly customizable system that wouldn't strain the IS and IT teams in terms of setup, config, hosting, maintenance and support. As Kai Hilton-Jones, Harte-Hanks's European IS Manager, says:

Zendesk has been on my radar since its inception a few years ago, so I decided to give it a go. It proved to be the best system for us because of its simplicity from an end-user perspective combined with a powerful engine behind the scenes. We looked into integrating Zendesk and LiquidPlanner because we found ourselves manually duplicating Zendesk requests as tasks in LiquidPlanner. This was inefficient.

To address that duplication, Harte-Hanks created a set of Triggers and Targets that sends Tasks from Zendesk into their LiquidPlanner inbox. An issue is captured in Zendesk, becomes a task, and is then sent to LiquidPlanner to become a project. This is exactly what Targets are for: the ability to send tickets outside of Zendesk when needed.

"Zendesk and LiquidPlanner -- and the integration of both -- have made the IS [Information Systems] team leaner and more efficient," Kai said. "Internal clients have already noticed and have been complimentary. It is a win-win situation."

Being the Zendesk super-user he is, Kai also wrote this Target integration up in our Tips & Tricks Forum. Thanks Kai!

We love to hear about customers configuring Zendesk to work with their support and project workflows. We'd love to hear how you've extended your Zendesk -- share your Zenfession with us!

AutoPark iPhone App Shifts Customer Support Into Fast Lane

AutoPark is an iPhone and iPod touch app designed as an essential driving companion – with features that enable hapless motorists to:

• Avoid parking tickets by getting alarm reminders before their meters run out.
• Remember where they parked.
• Find nearby services (for example, gas stations or banks).
• Easily share parking information with others via email.

Developer and parking ticket hater Ramin Firoozye launched AutoPark on iTunes in mid-January. And for support, he turned to Zendesk, which he said he integrated into the app in less than one hour using Zendesk’s iPhone SDK.

Zendesk iPhone SDK kit allows you to automatically tag tickets with specific information from the application (for example, version number, operating system, etc.), which is far more useful than just sending emails and then having to manually sort them into the right support queue. (The SDK is also available for Android).

Check out the video to hear more about his Zendesk integration.

About the developer: Ramin Firoozye has worked for over 20-years in the tech industry developing a range of technologies from web browsers to server frameworks and social networks. His products have had over 100 million copies in distribution. He's the founder and principal developer at Frolicware, an iPhone product development and consulting house focused on user experience and well-designed applications.

AutoPark will be demoed at Macworld San Francisco in the Mobile Application Showcase Feb. 9-13.

Worst. Day. Ever.

It has been raining for the last week here in San Francisco. And when it rains it pours. And that's a very fitting picture of the situation at Zendesk Ops the last 48 hours. It started Sunday morning (PST) where a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped over as a client decided to push a backlog of emails to our system. More than 10,000 emails hit our servers within a few minutes. We should have been resilient to that, but weren't. By Monday afternoon everything was back to normal, application responding properly, all emails processed, no tickets lost.

If you're familiar with the Three Wise Monkeys, you will appreciate the Zendesk Ops version with yours truly trying not to show Anger, Frustration, Despair. Not our best Zen moment. Sorry. We will do better.

Connecting Email to your Help Desk

One of the more important aspects of your business help desk is how you capture customer questions, issues, problems, etc. While every organization is different in this regard, email remains a very popular way to gather incoming support requests. We like the ease that email offers as well. It's a tool most everyone already uses, so it's a simple way for customers to communicate when they have an issue.

Yet, email in-boxes aren't necessarily the best tool to manage those incoming requests. They are designed for open-ended conversation, whereas a support issue needs a clear process toward resolution. This is where bringing email into your Zendesk combines the best of both worlds. Your customers get to use email, a tool they are familiar with; while you use Zendesk to communicate and keep track of the whole conversation until it's solved.

Zendesk can start capturing mail as soon as you sign up, but if you want to customize how and where mail comes in (as well as how it's sent out), you will need to take a look at your Mail and Domains settings underneath the Account tab in your Zendesk. There, you'll find everything you'll need to use your own email address, capture requests from multiple email addresses, and personalize the mail you send out from Zendesk.

To learn more about the options and setup, we invite you to attend our upcoming Email and Host Mapping Webinar. Co-hosted by Adria (of Ask Adria fame) and Zendesk Magician Jake Holman, this webinar will take you through everything you'll need to know to fully integrate your email with your Zendesk. (They will also cover how to use your own url for your Zendesk.)

Webinar: Email and Host Mapping
Wednesday, January 27 8am PT / 11am ET
Register today

Graphic.ly Uses Zendesk For Beta User Feedback

Graphic.ly, a TechStars' company that raised $1.2M earlier this month for its multi-platform comic publishing platform, is launching its beta version under the "release early, release often" tenet, according to recent article on ReadWriteWeb.

The RWW article describes how Graphic.ly is using a combination of Zendesk, GetSatisfaction, and other tools to manage early-stage feedback and engage community members in the engineering and product discussions. Micah Bladwin, Graphic.ly's CEO, is quoted as saying:

The worst-case scenario is that we don't engage our community properly and lose their trust. There is nothing more dire than lost trust. The best case is that everyone who uses Graphic.ly sees their fingerprints allover it and shows it to their friends proudly, saying 'I built that. That's something I did.'

Read the full story on ReadWriteWeb.

We love hearing about the needs we're helping companies solve. Do you have a story to share with us? We'd love to hear about it - drop us a line through our Ask Us form on the left-hand side of this page.

Webinars With a Geeky Girl Bite

This month we've got a full calendar of free webinars hosted by Adria Richards, tech blogger and geeky girl extraordinaire. Adria is teaming up with some of our partners including Atlassian and SurveyGizmo to talk about the integrations they have created with Zendesk. She's also discussing topics ranging from the basics of Zendesk to CSS & design styling in Zendesk. There's a topic for everyone so check out which ones are most interesting for you.

The full schedule is:

  Weekly Zendesk 101 - newbies can learn the basics of how to use Zendesk

  Jan 20 CSS & Design Styling - take the design and branding of your Zendesk to the next level

  Jan 26 New Zendesk updates - learn about the latest updates from Zendesk engineering

  Jan 27 Email & Host mapping - learn how to route different email addresses into your Zendesk

  Jan 27 Welcome to Zendesk - for visitors who want to learn more about Zendesk

  Jan 28 JIRA integration - integrate your Zendesk with this bug and issue tracking tool

  Jan 28 SurveyGizmo integration - collect feedback from customers about their support experience

Click above to register for a specific webinar or browse all sessions.

The Help Desk, ITIL and Getting Things Done

A help desk is only as good as the processes you define for it. When setting up your help desk, it's important to ask: what are the steps you need to take in order to best serve your customer support requests? And what are your ultimate goals?

The traditional help desk defines its goals and processes according to government and corporate best practices such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). The goal within ITIL when dealing with customer issues or incidents specifically is "to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse effect on business operations". The main incident management processes you follow to achieve that goal are:

• Detection and recording
• Classification and initial support
• Investigation and diagnosis
• Resolution and recovery

Many of the businesses you know follow ITIL best practices, and while Zendesk is designed to accommodate these practices, we’ve also taken the route of simplifying or at least open up customer support to more lean and nimble ways of dealing with customer issues. ITIL was created with IT help desk needs in mind, and the role of IT has changed dramatically recent years with the introduction of cloud services, outsourcing and last but not least increased consumerization.

In the web 2.0 world David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) is a popular reference model and a method to … well getting things done. The popularity of GTD can be partly chalked up to its simplicity. Your life is already complicated so why use a complicated system to get through it all?

The GTD method breaks down how to deal with the stuff coming at you:

• Collect
• Process
• Organize
• Review
• Do

While similar to the ITIL incident management steps mentioned above, the GTD methodology is considered flexible and probably somewhat more accessible. Let's tweak it a little and apply it to our thinking for a new help desk. When getting your help desk organized and processes in place, think about these four basic steps:

1. COLLECT
The easier you make it for customers to be in touch, the better you'll be able to respond to and understand their needs. Zendesk offers multiple ways to collect requests and keep the conversation smooth: email, web portal, phone, forums, integration with your own site and many more.

2. ORGANIZE
After collecting customer requests, they need to be sorted and prioritized so that they’re properly identified and routed to the right people with the right skills with as few stations as possible. Rather than throwing all of your tickets in one huge inbox, Zendesk defines and routes incoming requests manually or automatically. Every ticket is described and assigned to an owner so everyone always knows exactly what is on his or her plate.

3. COMMUNICATE
When an issue arrives and your business processes kicks in you want to make sure the right people are notified. Zendesk leverages many different channels - email, web, SMS, tweets, etc. - to make sure both your customer, your staff and other stakeholders are up to date and kept in the loop.

4. FOLLOW-THROUGH
Unlike an open-ended email conversation, a support issue should have a well defined path and solid closure. Within Zendesk, an issue always has a clear state that helps move it along from a new issue to a closed one. And you can set up rules that kicks in at deviations from your defined course.

Love Your Help Desk
David Allen says that GTD is "stress-free productivity". At Zendesk, we say Love Your Help Desk. Clear and appropriate no fuss help desk processes are key to ensuring transparency, expectation alignment and ultimately mutual satisfaction. Between you and your customers, partners, colleagues, and managers.

Ensuring the Customer Service Feedback Loop with SurveyGizmo

There are a limitless number of ways to extend Zendesk, and SurveyGizmo, the maker of simple executable online surveys, has implemented a very cool use for Zendesk to automate their customer interaction workflow.

SurveyGizmo uses Zendesk for all their customer interactions by integrating a link to a customer feedback survey attached to notifications of tickets deemed solved.

Customers are able to give immediate feedback on the service experience, and by passing along customer and ticket information from Zendesk to SurveyGizmo, you can ask customers for only the relevant information and let the systems do the rest.

Read more on how SurveyGizmo is using the tool, and their tips for implementing it on their blog in the article Integrate Customer Feedback Surveys into Zendesk Solved Requests. Great stuff!

Thank You For An Amazing Year

It's been a whirlwind year for us and we couldn't have done it without your support - thank you for all you've done to support our exponential growth!

Over the past twelve months we've raised over $6M in funding, moved from Denmark to Boston at the beginning of 2009, and finally settling in San Francisco in October. 

We've met some incredible new people along the way - friends, partners, new employees, and customers. We'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

Happy Holidays!

Photo courtesy of Laughing Squid.

Customer Support is the Backbone of Zendesk Businesses

Last month Zendesk polled over 500 customer support reps and commissioned a Harris survey of over 1,000 consumers to get their thoughts on customer interactions.

Harris Interactive asked consumers questions like:
- What industries are most important to have good customer support?
- Are you be more likely to talk up a good service experience or a good deal?

They found that 57% would be equally or more likely to talk about a good customer service experience than a good deal.

Interestingly, customer service caught the attention of men more than women, indicated by men being more likely than women to talk up a service experience.

We also did our own poll with Zendesk support agents and found that 58% said support was the backbone of their organization.

This fairly high percentage made sense since our customers tend to be organizations that recognize the value of good customer support. 

The Zendesk survey found that 59% of agents said happy customers need a response within one hour or less.

Again, makes sense in the digital age and the expectations that come with it. A few people wrote us back directly and said, "I was looking for the answer of 'immediately'. My customers expect answers right away."

Despite the appearance of many new communication platforms in recent times, 50% of agents believe that "email" will be the most dominant service channel in the near future. Interestingly a majority also agreed that Twitter was least dominant service channel in the list.

The results of both polls are available at www.loveyourhelpdesk.com, a website we recently launched as a resource for customer support teams.

SnapABug Integrates Visual Customer Support

Anyone who focuses on customer service is a friend of ours, which is why we're particularly pleased to announce that SnapABug has developed an integration for Zendesk, alongside SalesForce, PivotalTracker, and FogBugz.

Reinforcing the truism that "A picture is worth a thousand words", SnapABug leverages screen captures for visual customer support that improves customer satisfaction. This service is useful when the most effective way to describe an issue is to submit a screenshot. SnapABug makes this possible by providing customers with a dropbox that pops up and lets the user submit a ticket directly into Zendesk - including a screenshot of what is currently on the page.

You can follow the instructions on how to set up the integration at SnapABug's web site and in our support forum.

Seattle Meetup on December 15

We're hosting a meetup in beautiful, rainy Seattle, WA tomorrow Tuesday, December 15, for all Zendesk lovers, aficionados, customers and partners. The meetup will run 6:00 - 8:30 at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery & Restaurant, located at 1201 First Avenue South.

As always, the bar tab is on Zendesk.

RSVP via Facebook.

Webinar on Time Tracking in Zendesk with Harvest

Tomorrow and on next Wednesday we'll be co-hosting a free webinar that will get you up and running with our Harvest integration. Harvest is an smooth online time tracking and billing solution that lets you easily invoice clients and keep track of account receivables and revenue.

The Zendesk integration is tailored so that time tracked on individual tickets can easily be assigned projects and tasks in Harvest, so you can do all your billing and reporting on time spent on support and service directly in Harvest.

During the webinar, you'll learn how to connect Zendesk to Harvest, get traked time into Harvest, work with time records in Harvest, and close out of work for invoicing and export.

Wednesday Dec 9 7am PST, 10am EST, 4pm CET.
Wednesday Dec 16 2pm PST, 5pm EST, 11pm CET.

Register for one of the sessions here.

We Lost the Battle but Not the War. The Revolution Continues!

Last week we asked you to imagine a day without help desk workers and then challenged business owners and managers to give their customer service reps the day off today.

Well that didn't exactly happen. We lost that battle but feel pretty confident that we're winning the war.

The reality is that no company can survive 24 hours without their help desks and the results of a recent Harris Interactive poll, conducted on behalf of Zendesk, illustrates why. The survey shows that even in the midst of a difficult economic climate, service and support is more important than ever. In fact, 79 percent of respondents said good customer service makes them more loyal to the company and 57 percent said they would be equally or more likely to talk about a good customer service experience than a good deal.

So instead of taking the day off today, we relaunched LoveYourHelpDesk.com to raise awareness around the fact that the customer relationship is firmly in the hands of a business's support staff and is truly becoming the sales force of tomorrow. The LoveYourHelpDesk site is a resource to help companies better understand the potential of their customer service.

We hope the site will provide anyone looking for information about rethinking customer service the information they need, and inspire them to love their help desk. We also want to keep this conversation going beyond today on Twitter at @LYHD and on Facebook.

For full details please see our press release from this morning.