Social CRM: Managing the Consumer 2.0 Relationship (PR)

Here at Zendesk we're big fans of Get Satisfaction. If you don't know about them already, Get Satisfation is crowdsourced support, or people-powered customer service as they put it themselves. They provide a platform for consumers to come together around products or services to discuss and help each other. In many instances the sheer volume of people discussing a company's products will make the company participate and interact to facilitate and help. Amongst Get Satisfaction customers you find companies such as Adobe, Zappos and Six Apart.

Today Zendesk and Get Satisfaction are announcing an integration of the two products that promises to deliver full social CRM. The concept is as follows: Your company is using both Get Satisfaction and Zendesk. Get Satisfaction for your community discussions and Zendesk for support of your individual customer. If a discussion arises in Get Satisfaction that requires one-on-one interaction, you can pipe the discussion from Get Satisfaction over into Zendesk and wrap your business processes around the conversation to ensure that it's dealt with timely, securely and in accordance with company policies and service targets. To wrap it up, you can post your closing comments from Zendesk back to the Get Satisfaction topic the ticket came from.

WidgetBox has been a beta customer on the integration, and you can read more on their experiences in the enclosed press release. Another beta customer was Free Agent Central that posted their reaction in a somewhat premature blog post back in May already.

Go ahead and take the integration for a spin. You can find full documentation in our support forums. Full press release below the fold.

Best Farewell Ever

On July 9 TechCrunch Europe is hosting The Europas, a tech innovation award show honouring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Zendesk is nominated in the category Best Enterprise B2B Startup.

You may not know this, but Zendesk is a European startup, more precisely a Danish startup, but have always had global operations, and right not we're in the process of relocating our headquarters to the US. Give us a good farewell by casting your vote on Zendesk!

Bug Tracking Meets Help Desk: Zendesk and Atlassian Tie the Knot (technically speaking)

Bug tracking is usually reserved for the engineers in the back room who hold all of the technology secrets. The customer service folks get to walk people through the solutions once the engineers figure them out. Until now, marrying the two was not a very harmonious proposition. Today, Zendesk is announcing integration with Atlassian, which builds Web-based collaboration tools for developers and has more than 15,000 customers worldwide. JIRA is one of their most popular tools, and it’s one of our favorite applications for bug tracking.

Now JIRA developers can integrate with Zendesk to offer a customer support interface that, as we like to say, is beautifully simple. Now any support organization can integrate their Zendesk with their engineering department's bug tracking application. This means that Zendesk tickets and JIRA issues become part of the same system, enabling engineers to report back to the help desk on progress resolving product issues. In turn, help desk support people can keep customers abreast of progress. And informed customers mean happier customers!

The integration requires installation of the Zendesk Updater plugin, which is available via Atlassian's Plugin Exchange. Please refer to our support forums for further documentation on the integration. Also observe that we have open soured the JIRA plugin, and you can access the source code from Zendesk's Github repository.

San Francisco Meet-up v3

We're back in San Francisco for another meet-up for Zendesk customers, partners, friends and fools. This year we're co-hosting with our friends from Get Satisfaction.

Looking forward to seeing you at The Brick House Cafe in SOMA on Wednesday July 1st from 6-8pm. As always please RSVP via the Facebook event page.

Dropbox Support for iPhone and Android Apps (PR)

We're pretty psyched to announce a new mobile Dropbox that you can embed in your iPhone and Android apps. Zendesk has had a web Dropbox for a while now. It enables you to easily embed a feedback or help mechanism in your web site without building your own html forms or integrating to our API. You can see an example of a Dropbox right here on this page, it's the little tab on your left. The mobile Dropbox does exactly the same for your iPhone and Android apps.

So are you an app developer for one of these platforms and do you want to make sure that your customers can always submit feedback or support requests directly to you from within your application, you can now embed a mobile Dropbox in your application. All customer requests are being piped directly to your Zendesk ensuring that your customers get the service transparency they expect and you as a developer gets professional-grade workflow to properly deal with customer service and support.

The talented people at jTribe and Headnix are already embedding the mobile Dropbox in their popular apps, and you can too by downloading the code libraries directly from Zendesk's GitHub repository. Both the Cocoa library for iPhone and Java library for Android are available and we've open sourced it so that you can extend and customize it to your needs exactly.

Full press release below the fold.

Boston Meet-up this Wednesday

As we're preparing for today's meet-ups in Hamburg and Copenhagen, we're thrilled to announce that we'll have our first meet-up at our new Boston HQ this Wednesday already. A lot of things are going on in Boston next week, and we also hope to see a lot of our friends from the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming by.

Look forward to seeing you on 107 South Street Wednesday 24 June from 6-8pm. Zendesk will host an open bar and nibbles. As always please RSVP via our Facebook event page.

Zen Tunes has Arrived to Facebook

Now you can chill out to soothing Zen tunes on Facebook too, as the virtual Zendesk Buddha Machine now is available as a Facebook app. Go visit and share it today for good help desk karma.

More CRM for your Help Desk

The last thing anyone wants to do is get in the way of a sale. Woe is the guy that costs his company some much needed revenue, especially in these times, because he lost some information or wasn’t aware of a customer support issue. As a help-desk company that also likes to make sales, we really understand the value of good customer service. (Side note: good story on value of good CRM data on InsideCRM.com).

That is why we are happy to announce our two-way integration with Tactile CRM, a great UK company that provides web-based contact and sales management system for small businesses and departments. With this integration our customers can display user information from Tactile CRM on ticket requesters directly in the Zendesk user interface, and ticket information from Zendesk on customers in Tactile CRM.

So, if you're running both Tactile CRM and Zendesk you will always know what customer information you have on your support requesters, and vice versa, the outstanding support tickets you have with customers. Voila, no more sales lost because of miscommunication or lost information.

From Zendesk simply go to the Account tab and configure the relevant Tactile CRM widget (going live Tuesday morning CET). From Tactile CRM simply enable the integration from the Admin area as described in this nifty little video from Tactile CRM embedded below.

Want to learn more? Meet both the Zendesk and Tactile CRM crew tomorrow at Zendesk's meetup in London at The Dover Castle, 6:30pm Tuesday, June 16th. We look forward to seeing you there.

Mobile Branding and Localization

With the feature upgrade last weekend, the mobile Zendesk UI experienced some improvements.

Your branded color-scheme and i18n settings are now mirrored in the mobile user interface. So if you have enabled the chinese end-user interface and have a red color scheme your mobile login page would look something like this example. The "remember me" login feature is now also fully supported in the mobile interface. So no more repeatable logins. Please note that the mobile UI is not iPhone optimized, but accessible from any mobile device with a web browser.

Stay tuned for next week where we have more news for our iPhone and Android developers out there.

Also, remember to check out the details for the latest feature release, that included a new ability to merge tickets, full CSV downloads (no more pagination), client capture and auto-subscriptions. Read more about it in our support forums. Have fun.

Support Billing with FreshBooks

There’s nothing like capping off good work with an incorrect invoice — no client likes getting a $4,000 bill for a $500 issue. Accurate and efficient billing is essential to any professional or organization who provides time and material-based services. The good news is that it’s easy to get this part right.

We're pleased to announce the FreshBooks Widget, which allows you to easily report time on FreshBooks projects from within Zendesk. FreshBooks provides the fastest way to track time and invoice clients and has helped more than 800,000 users since 2004. Now you can do incident-based billing without leaving Zendesk during your daily work.

The widget can be configured in just a few minutes as described in our support forums.

If you are not already using FreshBooks, use the coupon code "zendesk" to save $20 on a new subscription. You can also read more about the integration on FreshBooks' blog.

First Copenhagen Meetup and Last Farewell

On Thursday June 18 we hope to see all Danish customers, partners, friends and fools for our first actual Copenhagen meetup, which will also be a farewell to Copenhagen from the three founders Alexander Aghassipour, Morten Primdahl and Mikkel A. Svane, as we're joining our US crew in the new headquarters in Boston.

Please join us at Fischer from 5-7pm, where nibbles and, more importantly, the bar tab is on Zendesk. As always we kindly ask you to RSVP via the Facebook event page.

See you in Copenhagen!

Hamburg & London Meetups

If you're already a Zendesk lover, you know that Zendesk meetups have been announced for both Hamburg and London.

In Hamburg at the Chilli Club, 6:30pm Thursday, June 18th. (RSVP via Facebook).

And in London at The Dover Castle, 6:30pm Tuesday, June 16th. (RSVP via Facebook).

Zendesk meetups are informal events open to Zendesk customers, users, partners and friends where Zendesk staff is hosting gossip, snacks and drinks. Don't forget to join Zendesk Lovers and be the first to know when meetups are taking place.

Tidbits: Pass-Through Email and CAPTCHA

This weekend will bring some nice new features for Zendesk and in general June will be packed with announcements. Anticipating the new features, don't forget to check out some of the latest announced product additions and features.

Early april we announced enhancements to the Reporting capabilities, new widgets and a new features called pass-through email. The latter allows you to make sure that whatever email address your customers are contacting you on, they will receive updates and replies from that same email address. As you already know you can set up your Zendesk to receive emails sent to any email address you want to, and dedicate separate workflow to each of them. If you maintain separate brands on separate email addresses the pass-through email feature will allow you to keep those brands separate.

Later in April we introduced CAPTCHA validation of anonymous user requests, a new tagging UI, and centrally managed topic and ticket subscriptions. Often it makes sense to run an open help desk, especially if you have many spontaneous or intermittent customers and don't want to hassle them with a registration process. For that purpose we now have implemented CAPTCHA validation on the online ticket submit form to ensure that your help desk isn't flooded with spam.

Don't forget to check out what's coming to your Zendesk by following our Announcements (also via RSS).

A Tech Support Hero is Something to Be

Organic Technology Consultant Adria Richards of Aden Networks, model Zendesk customer and blogger on But You’re A Girl, has a daily web show called Ask Adria.

We've mentioned Adria before (see There are Women Out There that Wants to Wear Your Stuff) when she called us out and made us aware that our tee line was men-only.

This week Adria has received a copy of our new tee line, and has dedicated her Tuesday show to talk about her many years of experience with various help desk systems titled "Be a Tech Support Hero with Zendesk". Get some insight from a person in the know and watch the show. We've embedded it here (it's approx one hour), and love it. Not (only) because Adria is a big Zendesk fan, but also because Adria talks about these things in a way we all can relate to.

Adria, you got some big fans here too!

Amsterdam Meetup

Zendesk meetups have mostly taken place in the US and APAC region. But that's going to change as we're now announcing the first in a series of European meetups. This one is to take place in Amsterdam on Tuesday June 9 from 6-8pm at Café Restaurant Dauphine.

Yours truly is in town for SIIA OnDemand Europe 2009 and we wanted to take advantage of the trip to reach out to Zendesk customers, partners and friends in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is not our largest market, but we hope to see as many as possible of the ~100 Dutch companies and organizations that have taken Zendesk for a spin. As always please RSVP via the event's Facebook page. Everybody's welcome. See you in the bar!

Stay tuned for news on Hamburg, London and Copenhagen meetups.

Boston HQ Sneak Peek

On this quiet and uneventful Memorial Day we hereby offer a sneak peek at the new Boston Zendesk headquarters, where the sun always shines, and the buddha machines quietly hum in harmony as tickets are being resolved and new features being designed.

SSO with Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Jon Gales is a Django/Python developer and he has recently posted instructions on how to enable Zendesk remote authentication with Django.

Jon writes on his blog:

I had a pleasant time yesterday hooking Zendesk into an existing Django site. Their API has a hook for remote authentication which is a lot easier than their chart makes it look. Actually it was accomplished in only a couple lines of Python. [...] To the user it’s all transparent. Kudos to Zendesk on making it so easy.

Thanks to Jon for sharing and good luck and have fun to all Django developers out there. You can read more on the Zendesk Remote Authentication API in our developer section.

Zendesk Buddha Machine v2

Together for the first time. Zengirl and Zenbaby presenting the new Zendesk Buddha Machine version 2. With new tunes, pitch control, slimmer packaging and an even greener Zendesk green.

Share your Zenfessions to get your own ZBM2!

G'day Again

We're back in Australia for a couple of meetups. In Melbourne on May 27th and Sydney on June 1st. As always we look forward to seeing our friends, customers and partners in the neighborhood. And feel free to bring a friend--or a prospect.

In Melbourne we'll see you at The Bull & Bear from 5-8pm. In Sydney we'll be at The Australian Hotel also from 5-8pm.

As always please RSVP via the Facebook event pages. See you there!

Thank You, Wellington

Last month's meetup in Wellington was a lot of fun and splendid networking in this beautiful city. We want to thank our good friends, customers, partners and other aficionados for turning up, here amongst the guys from Xero, Madefromnewzealand.com, Silverstripe, Ponoko and everybody else. Great seeing you.

Next up: Sydney, Melbourne, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Boston and San Francisco. Again. Stay tuned for updates. Or go become a Zendesk Lover on Facebook for the latest.