Get Your Zendesk Help Desk Staff with oDesk

oDesk, the global service marketplace for small and medium sized business to hire, manage, and pay remote freelancers or teams, has created a Zendesk Group which lets our customers leverage oDesk's extensive listings when they're looking to hire help desk staff. So far, about 50 people have applied to the group and about half have been approved.

In addition to creating a group to find qualified Zendeskians, oDesk has also selected Zendesk as their help desk partner after sourcing 15 other companies to manage their growing case load of more than 10,000 tickets a month. They will be launching a new Zendesk Customer Support portal in early 2010.

Each month, thousands of companies of all sizes post jobs on oDesk, representing jobs worth more than $65,000,000. Talk about growing in leaps and bounds! We look forward to growing our service and offerings along with oDesk in the coming years.

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 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.

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?!

A Tweet is Worth a Thousand Words

Nobody likes to brag, but the feedback we're getting after the launch of the new editions and new site last month, is outright humbling. Here's a few tweets from the last couple of days that we think capture our zen-ambitions excellently. Thanks guys. Love you.

Meet-up Hong Kong

We're back in the APAC region and are very much looking forward to see all of our good friends, customers and partners in Hong Kong for our first real Hong Kong meet-up. Belle, Bill, P.K., Don and the rest of you, join us at the East End Brewery, Quarry Bay on Saturday, October 10 from 5-7pm. The bar tab is on Zendesk.

Looking very much forward to seeing you all. As always please RSVP via Facebook.

Thank You, Mr. Smith

Whoa!

It's hardly two weeks since I wrote about some really cool Zendesk implementations where customers had explored the capabilities of our CSS customization. And then this happens. Viewbook, the online service for visual creatives, and Onehub, the online collaboration solution, both launch these kick-ass Zendesk implementations that completely adopts the look-and-feel of their parent web sites that are awesome! Thanks for making us look so cool.

Story of Clive the Support Agent

"There is a happy ending after the tale of woe and despair. If you're a software company that needs to offer customer support and link to your own systems, read on! Our tale starts with an over-worked programmer, Clive, doubling up as support agent, slaving away on the helpdesk..."

That's how the Zenfession from Paul Curtis starts, recounting the story of Clive, an over-worked programmer doubling up as support agent, and how he discovers the path to enlightenment. It's a great story and we're thankful that Paul has made the effort of putting it together.

Zenfessions are shared customer experiences. Go check it out if you want to learn how other organizations have implemented and are working with Zendesk. And remember that you can share your Zenfession too. We'll throw in a one of the amazing Zendesk Buddha Machines or a Zendesk tee for the effort.

Thanks Paul and everybody else for sharing!

SaaS Services 2.0

UK based Coherence Design has put together a range of packaged service solutions to help companies getting started with Zendesk. These services cover consultation, design, configuration, look & feel, and bulk data loading.

Paul Kopp from PK-Consulting wrote to tell us about his experiences with these services:

"Zendesk looked like a fantastic way for us to offer customers a help desk / ticketing solution, without the costs associated with big name vendors stuck in the past. The problem we had was zero time available for implementation; however we wanted to make sure to get the most value out of it. Based on our dialog with Coherence, we could tell they knew their way around SaaS in general and specifically Zendesk. With just a short discussion to understand what we were looking to accomplish, they had the look & feel we desired and came up with a great way of helping categorize and route all tickets. We are now better organized, on top of issues and the clients love it as well. To top it off, we are capturing additional revenue, which used to fall through the cracks, just by having records of work done. This additional (and unanticipated) benefit makes the help from Coherence pay for itself!"

We asked Graham Robson from Coherence for a few additional comments:

"Using Zendesk's comprehensive custom field capability, we created an industry specific ticket categorization schema suitable for PK -Consulting's business. Based on this we were then able to create appropriate business rules, views, and reports to help route and manage tickets aligned to groups who had the skills and expertise to resolve."

Although Zendesk is designed to be self explanatory and easy to configure, we think it's great that there exists companies like Coherence that can help Zendesk customers get to a running start in no time. And it's also really interesting to see what kind of service businesses can materialize on top of SaaS 2.0.

Paul and Graham, thanks for sharing this with us.