Love your new job. Current openings at Zendesk.

Zendesk offers a web application for customer care and support. The application is used by more than a thousand businesses and millions of users all over the world. Our customers love our product and so do we. We're currently a team of ~25 people spanning the world. We're headquartered in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and are looking for unique profiles to compliment our team.

Product Designer

We are currently looking for an passionate, talented and experienced Product Designer. You'll be working with a world class team on a product that is renowned for putting usability first and you'll be reporting to the Chief Product Officer.

Your number one priority is to keep the Zendesk user experience pleasant and hassle-free. This includes initiating, suggesting and spearheading major UI refactorings for a cleaner and more intuitive user experience. You'll also be designing the UI/UX side of all new features and enhancements, with a strong focus on simplicity and manageability.

You have some prior work which you're very proud to show us and a deep understanding of web application usability, combined with a strong graphic flair and an eye for visual consistency. You enjoy designing elegant solutions to complex workflows, and you know the devil is in the details. You love to innovate and design things that people will tweet and blog about.

Requirements:

• Well-versed in fundamental visual and interactive design discipline.
• 5+ years of experience in a user-centered design environment at the intersection of product and engineering, preferably in the SaaS space.
• Ability to articulate concepts and ideas through low- and high-fidelity prototypes, resulting in clear specifications for the development team.
• A way with words and a knack for reducing the complex to the bare essentials.
• Experience with user testing
• A technical mindset and well-versed with HTML/CSS/JS/AJAX. Prototyping abilities using any of these is a big fat plus.

Application Engineer

We're looking for a developer extraordinaire. The ideal candidate is a pragmatist who enjoys turning complexity into well structured, scalable and maintainable solutions. You understand the importance of keeping things clean, and know what works and what doesn't.

You are confident with *nix and open source databases, and have extensive experience with at least a few of the following technologies (or strong desire to work with them): Memcached, Git/Github, Sphinx, Nanite/RabbitMQ, TMail, authentication mechanisms (OAuth, OpenID etc.), Amazon EC2/S3.

It's a strong bonus if you can provide code samples of your work, preferably from existing open source projects.

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and maintain application and infrastructure components
• Refactor and improve maintainability of the codebase
• Rapidly fix bugs and solve problems
• Conduct design and code reviews
• Interface with product, front-end, and operations teams

Requirements:

• Expert knowledge developing and debugging in Ruby on Rails
• Disciplined approach to development, testing, and quality assurance
• Strong communication and documentation skills
• Preferably active contributor to open source software
• Experience with git and version control
• Experience with databases and caching

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We offer competitive compensation, vacation, medical and dental coverage, life and disability insurance, stock options and 401k.

Please send a brief to-the-point application with your resume to jobs@zendesk.com. Remote workers will not be considered.

To all recruitment agencies: Zendesk does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to Zendesk employees or any other company location. Zendesk is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

600 Ruby Developers Go Startup Crawling in San Francisco

The first annual Startup Crawl in San Francisco takes place this Friday, November 20, at some of the city's hottest startups -- and Zendesk is on the tour!

Some of the other companies on the Crawl include Scribd, Engine Yard, Pivotal Labs, Justin.tv, Apture, and Yammer. The event organizers are taking advantage of all the Ruby developers in San Francisco for Ruby Conf IX, which is running Nov. 19-21.

Since TechCrunch wrote a story about the Crawl on 13 November the number of RSVPs has shot up from about 150 to over 600. The Crawl buses will be stopping at 5th & Townsend to make visiting Yammer and Zendesk an easy stop: We're both on the 3rd floor of 410 Townsend. Anyone coming from the Valley can consider kicking off the tour at our offices since we're only a block away from CalTrain.

We're glad we had a practice run, hosting the Ruby meetup last week, because it appears this is going to be a meetup on steroids. And yes, in case you were wondering, we are hiring outstanding Ruby developers and the Buddha belly belongs to our mascot and not our staff!

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.

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.

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.

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

SSO with Your Drupal Site

We've long been fans of the Drupal framework and we're pleased to see today that the good people at Drupal.org, the official site of the open source content management platform, have created a remote authentication module which allows for single sign-on between Zendesk and Drupal supported sites.

For web sites using Drupal this means that users logged into your site are automatically logged into your Zendesk powered help desk.

We'd love to hear from you on about how you find the integration.

Get the full details on Drupal.org.

Migrating from Clarify, SSO in Rails, Expert CSS Tips

Want to learn how to do really great CSS customization with Zendesk, how you migrate tickets from your Clarify system to Zendesk, or are you looking for SSO with Zendesk from your Rails app? Here's three really great articles from the previous week on these exact subjects.

Migrating from Clarify
Gary Shermann, VP of Services and Support for Dovetail Software, demonstrates the power of APIs in this article describing how to migrate tickets from Clarify to Zendesk. Clarify was one of the leading old-school help desk products, now buried somewhere deep in the Amdocs product stack. Even if you're not migrating from Clarify, this article is a good inspiration for using the APIs to populate your Zendesk.

SSO under Ruby on Rails
Zendesk's remote authentication feature is a slick, easy and powerful way of implementing SSO for Zendesk. It makes Zendesk a serf of your primary authentication mechanism, that be MS Active Directory or any homegrown system. If your primary authentication system is built in Rails, Tobias Crawley from Hand Built Software LLC, has just released this little gem for helping you enable Zendesk SSO from your Rails application.

CSS Expert tips
We've recently mentioned Onehub and their really slick Zendesk implementation, taking the CCS customization capabilities to its boundaries. Now you can get a few tips directly from the source in this article published recently on Onehub's blog. BTW Onehub empowers virtual teams with online tools for collaboration. Remember to check them out.

Thanks everybody for sharing your knowhow and experiences with Zendesk.

When Support Tickets Turn into Projects

With last month's release a new Basecamp Target saw the light of day. Basecamp integration is a highly requested feature amongst our customers but so far we haven't really identified what the common use-case is. The new Basecamp Target was bred by our own Basecamp usage, and we look very much forward to getting some customer feedback.

If you're unfamiliar with Zendesk Targets they're basically communication channels that you can trigger from ticket events. One of our more popular targets is the Clickatell SMS target that enables to send out SMS messages triggered by specific ticket events, e.g. an escalation or a re-prioritization. Another popular target is the Twitter target that enables you to send out status messages or an event stream to a Twitter account.

Of course Basecamp is the legendary web-based project-management tool, that has led the way for many enterprise 2.0 start-ups like ourselves. It's built by the Getting Real people at 37signals, has millions of users and is renowned for its ease-of-use and simplicity.

Here at Zendesk we use Basecamp to qualify, plan, assess and discuss the hundreds of feature requests we harvest from customers, stakeholders and of course ourselves. Some of these feature requests are spawned of support tickets. In stead of having a manual copy-and-paste workflow, we implemented a Basecamp Target that enabled us to create a message in a Basecamp project directly from a support ticket.

And that target is now available for all our customers. As with any other target you have full control over the conditions that triggers the target and what the target sends. It's enabled by an account admin in the Account tab: select Targets and then "add target". When configured and enabled it's available as an action on all triggers and automations. Have fun and let us know what you think.

Reporting from the Cloud: On-demand Analytics with Youcalc

Last week we announced a new edition of Zendesk that included some new reporting features. With Zendesk Plus+, users now get a near real-time CSV feed of ticket data including resolution time metrics and custom fields. You can import the feed directly into Excel or another spreadsheet application. But what we think is really cool is the work that some of our partners are doing to make real-time reporting even more useful for our users. Today we're excited to highlight an app that allows you to connect directly into another cloud-based service.

Youcalc, an on-demand analytics company, has put together a really cool application -- the Dashboard for Zendesk -- that displays your tickets like you have never seen them before. The Youcalc dashboard can run standalone or be embedded into your website.

The Dashboard gives you the option to see your tickets at-a-glance which includes a ticket overview with any backlogged items and how tickets have been created over the last 10 weeks including a neat weekday overview as well as a time-of-day overview. And the ability to analyze tickets based on properties and an Agent Performance interface showing the distribution of tickets per agent as well as average resolution time.

Youcalc gives you the ability to copy and modify the standard reports using the Youcalc builder. And according to Youcalc's blog you can "expect more Zendesk apps to come as we get feedback from users and as users start to customize and build their own Zendesk analytics apps on Youcalc". Sounds very good.

Best of all, it's completely free. Grab it here.

As the new reporting feed is only available for our Plus+ customers, Youcalc has developed a widget for agents on all plans that makes it easier for them to track their personal performance. It's optimized for the Zendesk widget interface and can be implemented as a custom widget using Youcalc's code snippet. It also runs on the iPhone Safari browser making it easier to track reporting on-the-go. Get it from Youcalc's web site.

You can read more about both of these apps on the Youcalc blog. Enjoy!