A Message from Verizon

"Hi Zendesk,

Just wanted to let you know your product works perfectly on our BlackBerry Storm.

Lisa

Lisa Francis - Data Solutions Manager
Verizon Wireless"

The Bleeding Hearts and Artists Make Their Stand

Inspired by the Sam Poh Buddhist Temple and the incredible Buddha Machine live performances, the Zendesk Hong Kong crew together with the talented people at Beansbox, have put together the FM3 Buddha Machine Wall. The wall enables you to mix all of the nine Buddha Machine tracks, live and just in front of you. It mimics the roomy ambience of the live performances by directing the individual tracks to the spectrum of your stereo speakers (or headphones).

Head over to the Wall and let the Zen encompass you in your efforts to provide enlightened customer support.

Safe Harbor Certification

We're very pleased to announce that Engine Yard, Zendesk's operation center and managed service provider, is now Safe Harbor certified. The Safe Harbor Principles is intended for organizations that store customer data and are designed to prevent accidental information disclosure or loss.

Zendesk works with Engine Yard for Rails-focused 24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure, and a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 customers. Engine Yard has worldwide operations, is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Amazon, Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

SMS, Twitter Integration and More Customization Options

Christmas comes early this year. Last weekend we launched a bunch of new features in Zendesk, whereof two will make it even easier for you to connect Zendesk to your own legacy systems or other cloud services.

First of all we've introduced Targets. Targets gives you the ability to fire off external events directly from within your workflow. Say for example that you want to update your accounting system every time a ticket is resolved. Now you can. We've populated your Zendesk with a couple of predefined Targets and more will follow. One of them is a Clickatell target, which allows you to send SMS messages with ticket updates. Another one is a Twitter Target, that allows you to push status updates to a Twitter account. And you can create your own custom targets too that fires off http-requests to internal or external systems. Read more about targets in our support forums.

Another really big thing is a complete rewrite of Zendesk's widget support. Now you can place as many widgets as you want to anywhere in the application. Including the customer-facing pages and the login page. And we've widgetized most of Zendesk's right-column content to give customers the utmost control. Our standard widgets for Highrise, Harvest, Campfire etc. have all been shrinkwrapped with a configuration page, but you can still create your own widgets using our widget Javascript API. We've also released a couple of invisible widgets that gives you access to insert custom CSS and Javascript on your pages. With that you can customize your help desk's fonts, headings, tabs, colors and even standard behavior. We really look forward to seeing how this will be used. And stay tuned for many new widget samples. Read more in our support forums.

Other new features include the ability to nest macros and custom fields in categories. And to bulk import users via CSV. More details here.

Remember to stay on top of new features coming to your help desk in a steady stream by subscribing to our RSS feed of announcements and important information.

The Beginnings of a Commodified Help Desk

Zendesk has a lot to be excited about these days. We can celebrate the 1st anniversary for our earliest customers, we have passed 120,000 users and very soon Zendesk can laud its 500th customer. We're growing at an incredible speed and are thrilled that so many are joining us on this path to enlightened customer support.

We have a bunch of interesting announcements coming up in the next months and will continue to dribble out new features and improvements to the system. In contrast to most traditional software companies we don't do versioning or migration releases or anything like that. We have a constant flow of new features and improvements, and we try to make them available in a simple and non-intrusive fashion so they won't disturb our customers' business processes or day-to-day operations.

As you can see from the Customer Karma section on our front page, we have a varied selection of customers. Customers are using Zendesk for employee support, IT help desk, consumer support or B2B support. Some process 10 tickets a week, some 250 tickets a day, some support thousands of end-users, some only a dozen exclusive customers. Some Zendesk customers are traditional brick and mortar businesses, some are pure-play web 2.0 shops, some are divisions of very large enterprises, others are one-man shops. Some are replacing an old Remedy installation to use Zendesk, some are implementing a help desk for the first time.

"We see the beginning of a true commodified help desk as the internet is shuffling the software commodity stack at an incredible speed"

With such a diversified customer base and varied usage pattern we see the beginning of a true commodified help desk. The internet is shuffling the software commodity stack at an incredible speed. Getting online or acquiring an email account was painfully complicated and extremely restrained 10 years ago, nowadays it's just there. Starting up a blog, establishing an intranet or setting up a collaboration tool was still a process for the few just five years ago. Now it's just a matter of investing a few hours and a few bucks before you can set up a fully functional enterprise infrastructure using tools from Google, 37signals, Typepad, Salesforce.com and the likes.

The web revolution arrived late to the help desk industry. But now it's here and in a few years nobody will think of their support system as a large or complicated organizational and technical investment, but as something they turn on with a flick of a switch. And Zendesk plans to spearhead that evolution.

"Zendesk will remain a product with instant gratification and no learning curve. As easy to adopt for the Fortune 5000 company as it is for the 20-man organization."

We will continue to build the product on the principle of Beautifully Simple. Zendesk will remain a product with instant gratification and no learning curve. A product that everybody can apprehend and acknowledge out of the box. A help desk that allows you to hit the ground running and focus on good old customer service rather than complicated business processes. And we will stick to the principle of Beautifully Simple without compromising on the feature set or the enterprise adaptability of our product. Over the next six months you will see new features and offerings from Zendesk that will ensure that Zendesk is as easy to adopt for the Fortune 5000 company as it is for the 20-man organization.

"So if you haven't done so already, now is the time to sit down and put down on paper all the costs you have in running, maintaining, upgrading, configuring and extending your current support system"

We feel certain that an Enterprise 2.0 industry will soar in the current economic climate. Historically the implementation and development of internal systems have also been expensive organizational maturation and retention projects. Those days are probably over. And the IT department is rapidly changing its role from hardware janitor to service operator. The hidden costs of running your own commodity systems have seriously started to surface.

So if you haven't done so already, now is the time to sit down and put down on paper all the costs you have in running, maintaining, upgrading, configuring and extending your current support system. Compare that to the US$2,000 a year a Zendesk system will cost you (for 10 agents). Can you justify the cost difference in actual financial metrics?

Can you identify the added value you get from your current expensive system compared to the costs of Zendesk? If you can and we can't dispute your calculation, we will send you one of our infamous Zendesk Buddha Machines and one of our very green Zendesk tees. Grab your pen and calculator. We're ready and looking forward.