I18n: Love isn't the Only Language We Speak

We aim to please and make using our product as enjoyable as possible by making ourselves accessible - it's the reason we give our new customers a call to welcome them on board and nd we host host meetups around the world.

A big part of making someone comfortable with your company is addressing them in their native tongue, and that's why we've extended our internationalization program and now have the customer-facing portal of Zendesk available in over 30 languages.

We've worked with customers from around the world in a crowd sourced effort to make Zendesk available in as many languages as possible, and we'd like to take a moment to thank these customers and partners, our international superstars: A Better Tomorrow, af83, Basvurum, Deskperience, Elvenite, Favit, Grenland Web, io, Jellyfish Co., Livechat, Mentine, MiniRepublic, Nabaza, Nod 32, Online Design, Opinsys, Oskando, Pulse 247, Realiso, Shortcut, Stylight, and Vitamin4B.

Thank you all.

See two good examples below, Favit's greek support portal, and MyCashflow's finnish support site. Also notice how Twitter's help pages now features user-selectable languages, a feature available for our Plus+ customers.

BatchBook Integration Tracks Support Tickets on CRM Contacts

BatchBook is CRM for small businesses. And a very neat social CRM system it is indeed. Today we're announcing a two-integration between Zendesk and BatchBook.

BatchBook users can track and collect information about their customers and any point of contact the business has with the customer. The new Zendesk integration now also gives BatchBook users a dashboard that shows open Zendesk tickets on BatchBook contacts, and vice versa, BatchBook contact data on support requesters directly in Zendesk.

We wrote about our relationship with The Small Business Web group in a blog post a while back, and we're pleased to say this integration is another happy product of this association.

For more information please see press release from BatchBlue Software, creators of BatchBook.

Please follow these instructions on how to set up the integration in BatchBook and Zendesk respectively.

Dublin Meetup on November 25

Come join us for a pint of Guinness in the wonderful capital of the green island of Ireland. Wednesday, November 25 from 6:30-9:30pm we're hosting a meetup at The Porterhouse Central in Dublin.

Nick Franklin and Jake Holman will be entertaining, welcoming customers, partners and friends for a informal evening, talking Zendesk, help desk and meeting like-minded people, sharing a few pints.

RSVP to the event through our Zendesk Lovers Facebook fan page where additional information is available.

Ruby Meetup this Thursday

Ruby enthusiasts have been attending Meetups around the Bay Area for several years, and as a Ruby shop ourselves, we're pleased to be hosting this week's event at our San Francisco offices.

Speakers are

• Morten Primdah, CTO of Zendesk, will welcome and give a brief intro to Zendesk infrastructure.
• Brian Mulloy, of the recently launched Apigee.
• Curtis Spenser, talking about CDN Fu, the Ruby language he developed.
  
• Christopher Haupt, CTO of Webvanta.
• Sarah Mei, a release candidate of her RubConf talk, "Indoctrinating the Next Generation: Teaching Ruby to Kids".

For more details on the speakers and topics, and to register for the event, visit the Meetup site here.

Zendesk will be supplying beer and pizza, and an opportunity to rub Buddha's belly. See you on Thursday at 6pm on 410 Townsend!

Paglo Integration Simplifies IT Service Management

Zendesk is used by our many customers in many different environments. We have customers using Zendesk for large scale consumer support operations, like e.g. Twitter, customers using Zendesk to support business customers or partners, and we have a bunch of customers using Zendesk for internal or external IT help desks.

For the latter group in particular, we are happy to announce that we have integrated the IT Management SaaS solution from Paglo directly into Zendesk. Paglo is the world’s first Search Engine for IT and it automates the collection of all of your IT data including information about your network, users, and assets and allows you to query and report on it. And our integration allows you to instantly look up computer names and understand what software is installed on each machine.

The Paglo widget for Zendesk enables agents to view customer's hardware and software network information when managing a ticket request. This means when you create or view a Zendesk ticket you can search for hardware or software used by the requester, or by typing in a network name for a computer or other hardware. Best of all, this all takes place from within the Zendesk agent interface.

The Zendesk and Paglo integration provides a number of unique advantages for the IT user:

-- Streamlined way of creating new tickets with inventory information attached, so you can focus on solving IT problems instead of managing a complex ticketing system and a CMDB.

-- Web based so you can access tickets and inventory information from anywhere and any time.

-- Hosted solution means less infrastructure to maintain, there's no need for managing additional servers.

We are thrilled to be working with Paglo and to be able to offer you asset and software management directly through Zendesk.

For instructions on how to set up the Paglo widget, please visit our support forums.

Why Track All Customer Interactions? Ask United Airlines.

Are customer queries ending up unattended because they get lost or misdirected?

It can be a hugely expensive error to let customer support channels go unanswered, as United Airlines are learning these days.

Recently, Armando Alvarez, a vice president at Best Buy, was flying from Dulles International to Connecticut, when he was denied a frequent flyer upgrade to First Class. A gate agent revoked Alvarez' upgrade when he went to board the plane because the agent deemed his Puma track suit 'too causal' for seating in First Class. 

In an interview with MyFoxAtlanta.com, it sounds like Alvarez' (well founded) grievances could have been addressed early on when he reached out to the company by phone and letter.

There's no way of knowing why United Airlines didn't respond to Alvarez' initial outreach to the company, but we do know the end result - we read about his story in Huffington Post and watched the video on MyFoxAtlanta.com.

Having a customer service protocol in place that tracks every customer interaction in an open and accessible system, helps ensure customer service issues are dealt with in a timely and effective manner. Perhaps if Alvarez' complaint had been visible to more United Airlines people, and promptly and adequately dealt with, we wouldn't be writing this post.

In the meanwhile, United Airlines, if you're reading this, we'd be happy to set you up with a Zendesk trial account and walk you through a roll out ;-)

Adopt Lil' Buddhy

Did you know we host a forum for Zenfessions, and that if you tell your story that we'll send you awesome swag like the Little Buddhy shown here? (headphones not included).

Little Buddhy was a big hit at our Office Warming Party last week, and we wanted to make him available to those sharing their stories with us.

Zenfessions is an open forum, dedicated to the how and why, of how Zendesk is working for your company. As you can see from the view numbers on the stories, this section gets quite a bit of traffic which makes it a great opportunity to tell us a little about your company while letting the community know how the product works for you.

Leave a story or feedback in the forum and we'll send your choice of shirt, Zendesk Buddha Machine, or our new favorite... the little buddhy. 

What are you waiting for?!

Zenauguration

Thank you everybody who came by our new SoMa office space on 410 Townsend yesterday for our office warming and made it a great event. The Tamale Lady ran out of Tamales and the cocktail bar ran out of Lychee Martinis which we take as a good sign. More photos from the party at Flickr and on the Laughing Squid blog (btw, see you at our Christmas party, Scott).

Global Help Desk: Multiple Languages and Time Zones Simultaneously

A frequent feature request from our globally operating customers was the ability to work within multiple time zones and languages simultaneously. And in the Plus+ plan released in August, we delivered that functionality.

Your Zendesk can be set up with a default time zone for the help desk, while users and agents can set their own time zone according to location. Notifications and events in the event log will then be displayed relative to the time zone of the user reading the message log or receiving the email. A comment posted by a support rep in San Francisco at 9:05 in the morning will for the customer in Munich, Germany, appear as a comment posted at 18:05 local time.

In Zendesk you can set up the customer facing portal in a language of your own choice. Zendesk supports more than 30 languages including double-byte languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Plus+ plan customers have the more advanced ability to support multiple languages simultaneously. The Administrator sets which languages are available to customers and they'll be able to change the language according to their preferences.

The full list of supported languages is: Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Vietnamese.

What Happens in Vegas...

Las Vegas was everything it should be - from the couple who got engaged on the flight from SFO to LAS, to the constantly whirring slot machines, to the showgirls at the Tech Set party.

We were able to pull ourselves away from the siren calls and cooing slot machines to have some drinks with our fellow Zendeskians before the Opening Night party at The Mirage. And we gave away some of our awesomely redesigned new shirts and a few Zendesk Buddha Machines too.

Thanks to everyone who came out - see you next time!

New Video Tutorials

Head over to our support site to check out the new nine introductory video tutorials that we have just released. And stay tuned as more are being produced. We take requests. So please submit your comments alongside what videos you really want us to do.

And notice that all videos also are available on YouTube and as podcasts on iTunes.

Brisbane Meetup on October 28th

Brisbane, Australia is the new hot spot for Zendeskians!

Earlier this year we hosted Meetups in Syndney and Melbourne, and now we're bringing the fun to Brisbane. On Wednesday, Oct. 28th, we'll be meeting at The Pig N' Whistle Pub (123 Eagle Street, Riverside Centre) and Zendesk is buying the drinks.

Come by to meet fellow Zendesk lovers, aficionados, customers and partners. Get more details and RSVP on Facebook, or send Justin an email to let us know you're coming.

Hope to see you there!

Atlassian Releases JIRA 4. Zendesk Plugin Adds New Features.

Congratulations to Atlassian - the Aussie company specializing in collaboration and development tools for developers - on the public release of JIRA 4. Out of beta and into prime time!

The Atlassian Plugin Exchange is the largest plugin ecosystem of its kind, and earlier this summer we released an open source JIRA/Zendesk integration on the Plugin Exchange. The integration creates JIRA issues based on Zendesk tickets, and keeps the communication on the two in sync by transferring comments back and forth.

Our integration was described by the Atlassian team as delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich - a combo that just makes sense!

We're continuing to extend the integration, now with public and private comments and support for pushing attachments from JIRA to Zendesk. You can check out the integration on Atlassian's plugin Exchange.

Join Us in San Francisco for Our HQ Office Warming Party

As you likely already know we've recently relocated to San Francisco, home of our new global headquarters. On Thursday, October 29 from 5-8:30pm, we're hosting an office warming party in our new offices and we'd love to have you visit the new space and join us for a drink.

Our new offices are in SoMa on 410 Townsend just across the street from the CalTrain, and we're sharing the neighborhood with many of our friends and customers. In fact, our office building is also home to EventBrite, Yammer and Twine to name some.

We're thrilled to be keeping such good company and look forward to meeting many more from the community over the coming months and years.

RSVP for the event on the Zendesk Lovers Facebook page or on Eventbrite

Looking forward to seeing you!

National Customer Service Week

The global economic shakeup has reaffirmed our belief that customer service will be the cornerstone of all companies who continue to thrive in tomorrow's economy. Getting customer service right is more important then ever, but we all still struggle with it. Giving your customer service professionals the best tools to make their job easier is a first step to making the help desk experience a good one for customers. But ultimately it's personal relationships and the human touch that differentiates successful companies, and that's why customer support agents are the most important employees your company has.

Oct 5 - 9 is Customer Service Week and companies all around the country have been celebrating. In 1992 the U.S. Congress proclaimed Customer Service Week a nationally recognized event, celebrated annually during the first full week in October.

Customer Service Week is a national event devoted to recognizing the importance of customer service and to honoring the people who serve and support customers with the highest degree of care and professionalism.

We'd like to offer a special thank-you to all the customer service agents out there for the fantastic work you do - none of us could do what we do without your work. We're spreading good karma during National Customer Service Week and we would like to let our customers know we appreciate their commitment to their customers

A toast, and a pat on the back, for a job well done!

We're Bringing Sexy Back. One Tech Shirt at a Time.

We have some fun new Zendesk shirts - women sizes (shout out to Adria at But You're a Girl!), short and long sleeves, kid sizes and a new orange color we think goes well with the changing seasons.

All tees sport hand-drawn designs and are individually numbered by the outstanding team at GMtee.com.

And you can get one too. Head over to our Zenfessions forum and share your story. Read how other Zendesk customers are using their Zendesk help desk. Share your stories with Zendesk and we will send you one of our brand new Zendesk Tees or the similar cool Zendesk Buddha Machine for good help desk karma.

Check out the progress of the Zendesk tee:

- Tee v1, It's Here and Its' Green.
- Tee v1, There are Women Out There that ...
- Tee v1, Another Girl in Our Shirt
- Tee v1, T-shirt Friday
- Tee v2, A Tech Support Hero is Something to Be
- Tee v2, In kids sizes and for dads...

BlogWorld Meetup in Las Vegas on Oct. 16

The BlogWorld Expo, Oct. 15 -17, brings together an incredibly diverse and innovative group of influencers and Zendesk is going to Las Vegas and throwing a meetup to meet YOU!

Adria from But You're A Girl will be joining us and will be filming short greetings with anyone who wants to contribute a welcoming wish to the team who's settling into the new offices in San Francisco. Adria will be putting together a fun video that will play at the office warming party on Oct. 29.

Meet us at the Mirage Hotel, Kokomo's Lounge, from 5:30-8:00pm. The bar tab is as always on Zendesk and there will be plenty of swag as well. Stay tuned for news on Zendesk Tee v3.

Tell a friend, bring a friend, tweet a friend. The event hashtag is #ZendeskON (Zendesk Opening Night) and we'll be using it to make event announcements.

If you can attend, please take a moment to register at EventBrite or Facebook so we can get an accurate estimate of how many people to expect. Thank you, and hope to see you in Vegas!

Keep Your Support Users and Help Desk Customers Updated via Email Newsletters

There's been a lot of integration news lately and we thought we'd provide a little background on what has brought about this spirit of cooperation.

The Small Business Web group is a group of like-minded SaaS companies who have come together to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses and providing an outstanding customer experience.

The members of this movement are dedicated to integrating each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.

The most recent Zendesk integration is from MailChimp, who generously called us an awesome help desk app. MailChimp is an email marketing platform that lets users send out html newsletters and other marketing materials via email, and provides sophisticated tracking tools and an open API. With this new integration you can have all your help desk customers and users subscribed to a mailing list, so that you can send out proactive support information and/or service related newsletters. To try it out simply go to your MailChimp account, make a new list and populate it using the Zendesk option. Sweet and easy.

It's fantastic to see the community continue to come together by leveraging each other's APIs to deliver the best of many. We love being part of this kind of forward-thinking collaboration that emphasis customer need.

Zendesk Named One of Mighty 36 by SIME Awards

The jurors at the SIME Awards have named Zendesk as one of the Mighty 36 leading up to the November 12, SIME Awards.

The SIME Awards were created in 1996 to honor excellence in online communication, business practice and technology, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and inspire the Scandinavian Internet industry to world-class performance.

The SIME Awards team screened hundreds of companies in the Nordic countries (Zendesk's founders are from Denmark) to find the rising stars of the Nordic world. From a group of 150 potential companies, the SIME jury selects 36 companies that are featured in three groups of 12 in the six weeks leading up to the winner announcement at the Nov. 12, 2009 in awards ceremony in Stockholm.

Nikolaj Nyholm, SIME juror, said that Zendesk, "While simple in concept, is extremely well-executed with strong management. Zendesk is surely going to be an on-demand support software brand name."

The Mighty 36 puts us in excellent company and we wish everyone good luck!

Notifications via AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber, GTalk, and Windows Live Messenger

The Austin, Texas based Exsom Group, a team of dedicated software engineers, has built support for Zendesk in their upcoming Exsom Echo product, currently in beta. The integration allows Zendesk customers to send out instant message notifications on ticket updates via AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber, GTalk, and Windows Live Messenger.

Get the full how-to at Exsom.com