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.

Paglo Integration Simplifies IT Service Management

Zendesk is used by our many customers in many different environments. We have customers using Zendesk for large scale consumer support operations, like e.g. Twitter, customers using Zendesk to support business customers or partners, and we have a bunch of customers using Zendesk for internal or external IT help desks.

For the latter group in particular, we are happy to announce that we have integrated the IT Management SaaS solution from Paglo directly into Zendesk. Paglo is the world’s first Search Engine for IT and it automates the collection of all of your IT data including information about your network, users, and assets and allows you to query and report on it. And our integration allows you to instantly look up computer names and understand what software is installed on each machine.

The Paglo widget for Zendesk enables agents to view customer's hardware and software network information when managing a ticket request. This means when you create or view a Zendesk ticket you can search for hardware or software used by the requester, or by typing in a network name for a computer or other hardware. Best of all, this all takes place from within the Zendesk agent interface.

The Zendesk and Paglo integration provides a number of unique advantages for the IT user:

-- Streamlined way of creating new tickets with inventory information attached, so you can focus on solving IT problems instead of managing a complex ticketing system and a CMDB.

-- Web based so you can access tickets and inventory information from anywhere and any time.

-- Hosted solution means less infrastructure to maintain, there's no need for managing additional servers.

We are thrilled to be working with Paglo and to be able to offer you asset and software management directly through Zendesk.

For instructions on how to set up the Paglo widget, please visit our support forums.

Global Help Desk: Multiple Languages and Time Zones Simultaneously

A frequent feature request from our globally operating customers was the ability to work within multiple time zones and languages simultaneously. And in the Plus+ plan released in August, we delivered that functionality.

Your Zendesk can be set up with a default time zone for the help desk, while users and agents can set their own time zone according to location. Notifications and events in the event log will then be displayed relative to the time zone of the user reading the message log or receiving the email. A comment posted by a support rep in San Francisco at 9:05 in the morning will for the customer in Munich, Germany, appear as a comment posted at 18:05 local time.

In Zendesk you can set up the customer facing portal in a language of your own choice. Zendesk supports more than 30 languages including double-byte languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Plus+ plan customers have the more advanced ability to support multiple languages simultaneously. The Administrator sets which languages are available to customers and they'll be able to change the language according to their preferences.

The full list of supported languages is: Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Vietnamese.

New Video Tutorials

Head over to our support site to check out the new nine introductory video tutorials that we have just released. And stay tuned as more are being produced. We take requests. So please submit your comments alongside what videos you really want us to do.

And notice that all videos also are available on YouTube and as podcasts on iTunes.

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.

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.

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!

New Products Announced as Peter Fenton joins Board (PR)

Today is a great day at Zendesk and we have 6 million new reasons to be excited!

First, we're psyched to announce two new Zendesk editions today. A Solo edition for independent consultants and home-based businesses, and a Plus+ edition for the somewhat larger companies with stricter governance requirements. The new editions constitute a big strategic step for us. Zendesk has been implemented in large organizations with thousands of employees and up to a hundred support reps, and in tiny boutiques with one agent and 25 customers. We knew we had to differentiate our offerings to be able to cater to all these different needs, but at the same time it was also critical that we kept the simplicity of the application and the transparency of the different editions. We think we have achieved that with our new offering, and we look forward to receiving your feedback. You can get all the details on the two editions of Zendesk at our brand new and snazzy web site.

We’re also very excited to announce we’ve secured $6 million in series B funding and that Peter Fenton from Benchmark has joined our board. We closed this Series B much earlier than required, but the stars aligned and we felt that Benchmark was the exact right partner at the exact right point in time. The team at Benchmark has done incredible things in the SaaS and consumer technology markets and we look forward to tapping that energy to take Zendesk to a new level, fueling the momentum we've experienced in the last year. Pictured to the right you can see Peter, yours truly and Devdutt from Charles River Ventures. Devdutt's done a fantastic job with us the last six months, and we're really thankful for Charles River's continued support as they're joining the B round pro rata.

We have a lot of stuff up our sleeves. We have a very active customer community and we simply love all the feedback and feature requests that we get. We won't be able to get it all done at once, but most of the stuff that you're requesting will come as soon as we've found a "beautifully simple" way of implementing it. Stay tuned for more.

You can read the full press release on the new products and the Series B below the fold, but allow us to take this opportunity to thank some of the people around us that have made it possible so far: The early friends & family investors who put their personal money into this project, Christoph Janz, possibly the best angel investor a start-up can have, our first employees that have worked so hard for so little, the reporters that have followed us from early days, and last but not least, all of our utterly incredible customers. Thank you Crystal, David, Jake, Mike, Graham, Björn and the rest of you. Thanks for inspiring us to do our best.

User Interface Customization with the CSS Widget

Zendesk offers an easy and convenient way for you to set up your help desk so that it resembles your web site's look and feel. You can change the colors, the favicon, the logo, the naming and even the customer-facing language. And it can all be done in seconds.

But sometimes that's not enough and that's why we offer a custom CSS widget, so that you can modify basically any aspect of the help desk user interface. Sometimes even subtle changes can have a big impact. Take a look a the examples below that we have stumbled upon when talking to our customers. If you want to do something similar go look for CSS tips in our forums. Have fun!