SupportAwards, Small Business Web, Other Weekend Tidbits

From August 1st you can nominate a company or support agent for outstanding customer support or service by filling out the nomination form at the 2009 Support Awards web site. The winner will receive the coveted R.E.C.S.S. (Recognition for Excellence in Customer Support and Service). SupportAwards.org was established to give recognition to Customer Support/Service departments and representatives across the world

In other news, Zendesk has joined the Small Business Web. The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate their respective products and make life easier for small businesses. It was founded by Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, Outright and BatchBlue Software.

Zendesk swag has been reviewed again. This time by Zendesk follower and Cloud Avenue reporter Ben Kepes. Fortunately Ben has a lot of "hot" things to say about our tee v1, but on the "not"-side he also observes that "The color is a little *ahem* bright".

Finally ReadWriteWeb took the integration of Get Satisfaction, Atlassian JIRA and Zendesk for a spin: "Customer service reps, it's your lucky day. It just so happens that three of the top Web-based support applications — ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and customer service platform Get Satisfaction — are now integrated." Read the full article here.

Preview: Solution Suggester

If you haven't seen it already take a look at Zendesk's support portal where a new "solution suggester" has appeared. This is a new feature we're testing before pushing it out to all customers. The tool takes natural language questions and turns them in to search queries for your support portal content. You will be able to tie this into the online web ticket creation flow and ultimately also to the email ticket creation flow. Stay tuned.

Citizens of Zendesk

Zendesk customers span the world. During the month of June we invited customers from eight cities in six countries to a local Zendesk meet-up, giving everybody a chance to meet and greet, exchange ideas, concepts and feature ideas, and least but not last have a good time with drinks and snacks.

Here are a few snapshots of Zendeskians uniting all over the world: From Melbourne and Sydney in east, over Hamburg, Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam in Europe, to Boston and San Francisco in west. Great meeting you all, hope to see you all again soon. And let us know where we should arrange the next series of meet-ups.

Made in Europe

TechCrunch recently launched their Europe Top 100 index, featuring the highest-potential European tech companies based on their YouNoodle score. Although Zendesk is now officially a US based company, we started as a European company (from Copenhagen, Denmark) and we're happy to see that we're currently ranking 28, right between TweetDeck and LOVEFiLM.

Also we became "Highly Commended" at the TechCrunch Europe Awards for "Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA)" but didn't win the category. Congrats to Andy and the team at Huddle for taking first price.

And although we didn't make it to Business Week's Fifty Best Tech Startups (unlike Huddle) we're excited to see that almost exactly 20% of the companies on the list are Zendesk customers.

Another Top list from comes from Wired Magazine who recently published a list of 10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music and of course the Buddha Machine made it to the list.

In more product related news: You may have read about our new JIRA integration on this blog three weeks ago. Now there's additional info from Atlassian on their blog. You can also read more on our Get Satisfaction integration on their blog, and it's been covered by Ben Kepes from Cloud Avenue.

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.