How Do You Feel About This Ticket?

Our good friends at Coremedia, one of Europes's leading CMS providers, have taken advantage of Zendesk's Widget API to build a Mood Barometer for their Zendesk help desk. The barometer widget gives Coremedia's customers the ability to provide a short and quick statement on how they estimate the progress of a ticket regarding the reaction time and answer quality.

You can read more about it on Coremedia's blog, and the team have also promised to give us the full details on the widget in our support forums.

Great to see this type of implementation.

Best API Ever

From Charlotte, NC, this just in:

When VergePoint was hired to implement a support system for a call center handling more than 80,000 call minutes per month the first candidate was Zendesk. Jason Prance from VergePoint says “Zendesk’s web 2.0 attitude and witty approach to customer service pulled us right in. In less than one week, the client was live on Zendesk and handling support tickets more efficiently than with the previous system."

Andrew Stallings is a freelance developer working with VergePoint. Andrew did the integration of Zendesk into the existing e-commerce cart and tells us; “Having done many similar integrations in the past, these tasks are generally quite complex, time consuming and costly. The Zendesk Remote Authentication API is created in a way that gives the developer the freedom to program this however he wants on his end, while all the complicated logic is handled on their end. This is one of the best API’s I’ve ever used.”

Thank you both Jason and Andrew for sharing this with us.

Zendesk Loves Twitter

It's no longer a secret that Twitter is using Zendesk for their online support. The romance started in the summer of 2008 and Twitter has gradually rolled out Zendesk in more and more areas until they announced earlier this month, that Zendesk is now the official support platform for Twitter.

In their blog post The Zen of Twitter Support from January 15 Twitter writes "We looked at several options and found Zendesk to be a perfect fit—it works seamlessly with other tools we love such as Campfire, Highrise, and they've even created a built-in Twitter integration."

Twitter is one of these companies and technologies that are true paradigm changers. Twitter changes how a lot of us are working and communicating, and how we understand each other and what's going on in the world. We're very proud that we have the opportunity to work with the Twitter crew, and we're fascinated by their story and their technology. We already have basic Twitter integration in Zendesk, and we plan to extend that considerably this year.

We believe that the entire support industry will gain from Twitter's choice of Zendesk. We will use their experiences to make "tweets" a fully legit support channel in our continued efforts to enable true online support for the networked generation.

And we want your feedback too. Let us know how we can integrate Twitter better into support processes. You can always tweet us @zendesk.

Next Stop Auckland

As previously announced our next customer meet-up takes place in Auckland, New Zealand.

We invite all Zendesk customers, friends, partners and aficionados in the area to Zendesk Meet-up Auckland on Thursday February 5th from 6pm to 8pm at the Sale St Brewery. Zendesk will host drinks, cocktails and snacks.

As always you're very welcome to bring a friend or a colleague. But we kindly ask you to RSVP via the Facebook event page.

See you in Auckland!

Revisiting the Wall

Since we launched the Zendesk Buddha Machine Wall back in December, the little wall of soothing music has received quite some attention and is now one of the most visited pages on Zendesk.com. It's been mentioned in the New Yorker, not once, but twice, and been the subject of many blog posts like this and this other one. Especially impressive is this sample produced by Echoes’ Jeff Towne based on the wall only.

So if you haven't visited the wall already, now is the time to head over and let the soothing music encompass you and bring a little Zen to your enlightened customer support.

Notifier Now Available for Android

The Zendesk Notifier that was released for iPhone in November is now also available for the Android platform. Visit the Android Market (web mirror) and download it for free. 250 users did within 24 hours after its release.

Zendesk Notifier for the G1 Android Phone is an application that agents use to quickly see how many tickets have been assigned to them. They can also see how many unassigned tickets exist in their help desk system. The app serve as a shortcut for logging into your mobile optimized Zendesk interface from your phone.

Defying the Temperature in Boston

Thanks Bostonians for attending the Boston meet-up at Hamersley's Bistro Wednesday this week. You're not easy to lure out in the cold these days when it's freezing -20C (-4F). Next stop Auckland New Zealand (where it's much warmer) stay tuned...

The Starfish Story

A Buddhist monk was walking along the beach one morning with one of his disciple.

Thousands of starfish had been washed up onto the shore after a fierce storm. Stooping down, the monk lifted a single creature and returned it to its home in the sea. The disciple asked why the master did this when it made so little difference to the mass of stranded starfish. As the monk lifted another single starfish he replied,

"It makes a difference to this one."
And he tossed it back into the sea.

I was recently reminded of this story while visiting the Starfish Project in Cambodia and its relevance to a help desk function. Electronically smile and personalize your answers. The requester will appreciate receiving a little positive karma in the electronic empty space of the internet. We strive to do this at Zendesk.

The Starfish Project is making a difference - consider helping them.

Calling all New England Zendesk Lovers

After our successful meet-ups in San Francisco, New York City, Melbourne and Sydney, we now visit the home of MIT, the vibrant tech scene in Boston, MA.

We hereby invite all Zendesk customers, friends, partners and aficionados in the New England region to Zendesk Meet-up Boston on Wednesday 14 January 6-8pm at Hamersley's Bistro, 553 Tremont Street in Boston, MA.

As always you're very welcome to bring a friend or a colleague. But we kindly ask you to RSVP via the Facebook event page.

Zendesk will host drinks, cocktails and snacks. See you in Boston.

Instant Support Access with Drop Box

Today we introduce the Zendesk Dropbox. It allows you to put a tab on your website and harvest support requests, feedback, enquiries etc. directly to your Zendesk help desk. The main idea is that you want to provide your web site visitors and customers with an easy and instantaneous way of asking for help or submit their feedback, but also want to ensure proper internal processes to deal with the inquiries.

The Zendesk Dropbox can of course be configured and customized in a number of ways, but just as Zendesk it works out of the box. Have questions to how it works? Click the little green Question tab to your left, and we'll get right back to you.