Two years later, mobile devices are more integrated into our work lives than ever. And that’s why we’re excited to announce a redesigned Zendesk for iPad, which brings:

• A new reporting dashboard so you can get key metrics, like response times and ticket activity, at a glance
• An updated design with a new agent dashboard that provides meaningful ticket views and shortcuts to common ticket actions
• More context about your customers with complete support history on their profiles
• And many more features that you can learn about in the Zendesk forums

But more important than the features, we just want Zendesk to work how you work. (And let’s be real, you’re probably tapping away on your couch rather than on a mountain top.)

Download the free app from the App Store.

Learn more about Zendesk for mobile.

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One of the ways we are making it easier to access customer information at the correct interaction points is with our newly updated Zendesk for Salesforce integration. The new integration unites your two customer-facing teams—support and sales, and their favorite tools—Zendesk and Salesforce, so everyone is on the same page when engaging with customers.

• Give your support team complete access to sales data and vice versa: You can pull in any CRM data, including custom objects, so your support team can see a full Salesforce customer profile right next to a live ticket—all without having to leave Zendesk. And for your sales team, they will be able to view complete Zendesk tickets including custom field data in Salesforce.

• Create a single customer database between sales and support that is always in sync: You can manage your customer records database in Salesforce but access it from either Zendesk or Salesforce with real-time data sync of Salesforce accounts, contacts, and leads with Zendesk organizations and users.

• View Salesforce reports which include Zendesk data: We’ve built a pre-built reporting dashboard in Salesforce with built-in reports that slice and dice Zendesk ticket data through several Salesforce lenses.

To learn more about Salesforce integration, watch the video above and check out our forum post or user’s guide.

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Alexis Maybank, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Gilt Groupe, had this to say at the Internet Retailer’s Conference & Exhibition 2012,”We know so much about consumers coming to the site and we’re in a position to build the most personal shopping experience. We know who the customer is, what his color preferences are, what his sizes are and what his friends like.”

Today, Zendesk is making it easier to deliver smart, personal customer service with the introduction of our new Magento integration.

With customers as your business’s most important asset, great support is a must-have for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. Zendesk makes it easy to deliver great customer service. Magento powers your e-commerce business. Together, they work to unite your business with a dynamic two-way integration between ticket data from Zendesk and e-commerce data from Magento.

This is how the Magento integration works with Zendesk:

• Get more visibility on relevant customer data, such as billing, shipping, and order info, from Magento on Zendesk ticket pages.
• Select and pull in only the custom ticket views you want displayed in Magento, so you can control what you want or don’t want to see.
• Stay up to date on the temperature of the order and customer with a single view of support information right next to critical sales statistics, customer profiles and sales orders.
• Add Zendesk communication channels to any Magento-powered site, so your customers can get in touch with your support team wherever they are.
• Create and update Zendesk tickets directly in Magento for greater support team efficiencies.

To read more about the Magento integration in detail, check out our forum post or user’s guide.

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Zendesk offers many ways to help meet the needs of your self-service customers, including access to knowledge bases and community forums on the web and even on their mobile devices. But we’re always thinking about how we can continue to help you build your self-service community.

Today, we’re introducing search improvements that make finding the information your users are looking for faster and easier by predicting what they intend to search for.

Here are just some of the improvements in search you and your customers will be seeing:

• Find only the best matches: narrow in on the best results for each search query even if the user’s search keywords are not exact. (We have a patent application pending on this advanced stemming technology!)

• Promote your forum content: emphasize user- or agent-generated content by boosting the type of content you want to showcase at the top of search results.

• Rank hot topics higher: move articles that answer frequently asked questions and searches higher up in search results. (This is an exclusive feature for our Enterprise plan customers.)

To read more about the search improvements in detail, check out our forum post or user’s guide.

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Today, we’re rolling out a new mobile customer portal interface to help our customers give their customers a beautifully simple self-service experience through the mobile web. The mobile customer portal is browser-based, so it works on any device, anytime, anywhere, and is optimized for a self-service community base.

Learn more about Zendesk’s customer self-service

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David Lorge Parnas, one of the pioneers of software engineering, once wrote about API: “Reuse is something that is far easier to say than to do. Doing it requires both good design and very good documentation.” So, in creating and updating our API, we make sure to keep our eyes on both.

We love seeing just how active our developer community is–with nearly 20 percent of all tickets generated across all Zendesk accounts created through our API. To add to that, our partner ecosystem boasts over 100 third-party integrations.

Back in March this year, we introduced our next-generation API v2 into public beta. Today, we’re continuing to build on a consistent, well-documented and fully-featured API. Here’s what we’ve been working on:

• Created more API endpoints so our customers can gather more insights, gain more visibility, and further automate admin workflows in their Zendesk
• Developed more documentation that accurately guides our developer community in enhancing their Zendesk, as well as building their own custom apps and integrations
• Standardized our API on the popular JSON format
• Introduced a versioned API so developers can build against a stable, well-documented API as we continue to grow Zendesk’s features and capabilities

Check out our developer site to learn more!

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HootSuite originally launched their first integration with Zendesk back in July 2010. But today’s release creates a more seamless experience for support agents and social media managers. Users can simply click the drop down menu next to each individual Facebook or Twitter message and select “Create Ticket” directly within the HootSuite dashboard streams. The message is then relayed into Zendesk, taking the whole conversation out of the public eye and onto a more personal customer service delivery platform.

Sarah Chambers from HootSuite’s Customer Support team explains how Zendesk and HootSuite work together: “Where Zendesk helps us, is when the conversation requires more than 140 characters, or privacy is required. By using the Zendesk plug in, we can then take the conversation offline to better resolve the user’s request. This integration is also more robust than our previous workflow, allowing us to tag tickets with additional information while simplifying the ticketing process, keeping everything in the HootSuite dashboard.”

Zendesk’s own Community Evangelist, Marissa Root, uses the new HootSuite app everyday to accomplish her mission of maintaining open and transparent communication with our customers. “Delivering customer service is a collaborative effort at Zendesk,” said Root. “The new HootSuite app plugin has helped make it easier for me to escalate certain social conversations so our support team can step in and deliver on our customer’s needs.”

Learn more about HootSuite’s new app plugin for Zendesk here!

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There are over 900 million people on Facebook creating 3.2 billion interactions per day. Customers are on Facebook and other social channels and businesses need to have a presence on those channels to engage with them. But customers (and companies) don’t always want these conversations to be held publicly. The issue might necessitate the inclusion of personal or sensitive information, or they might not feel comfortable discussing their purchases in a public forum. Now you can take those conversations out of the public eye with Facebook Private Messages.

With Facebook Private Messages, your customer’s private page message is translated into a Zendesk ticket. The support agent’s response to the Zendesk ticket is relayed back to the customer as a Facebook message. With Facebook Private Messages, you can efficiently engage with customers on the social media platform while helping to ensure the privacy and satisfaction of your customers.

Here’s what our customer, Gilt Groupe, had to say about the new feature:
“With half a million Facebook friends, we want to provide an open and engaging platform for them to talk to Gilt Groupe. But not all conversations should be in the public eye. The ability to turn Facebook Private Messages into Zendesk tickets allows us to seamlessly take our conversations off of a public Wall and still deliver support through the channel our customers prefer. It also makes it easy to monitor both current conversations and have saved references to old interactions in our own environment off Facebook.”

Give Facebook Private Messages a try on our Facebook page. Message us today about what you love about Zendesk and we’ll surprise you with a sweet Zendesk giveaway! (Giveaway promotion will end at July 11, 11:59pm PT.)

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What we heard across the board is how consumers are engaging with retailers in new ways—via mobile, social and chat. For those who didn’t make it out to Chicago, here’s a quick recap of the top themes from IRCE.

RETAIL INNOVATION
One of the IRCE highlights for us was the keynote speech by Alexis Maybankour co-founder of our customer Gilt Groupe, who encouraged continued innovation among retail businesses to delight their customers. She echoed Internet Retailer’s publisher Jack Love’s manifesto that highlighted the need to find new ways to meet the growing demands of today’s 21st century customer.

MOBILE
Alexis noted the influence of mobile devices in current consumer behavior, “As increasingly younger generations start shopping they want it on their terms and on their time, so there will be a big shift into mobile devices and shopping.” The boundaries where customers live, work and play are now blurred, so businesses need to be present and ready to provide support wherever their customers are.

SOCIAL
Alexis continued her address with the important role of social media in the retail lifecycle, “One thing that all retailers do and should do more often is find ways for their product to be inserted in the conversation. Allow people who are talking about your product to do it easily and make it easier for them to share.” The introduction of new social channels has presented more interactive ways for customers to engage with their favorite brands—driving greater customer loyalty. For example, she noted how traffic to Gilt Groupe from Pinterest now rivals traffic from Twitter.

LIVE CHAT
Customer service through live chat was an important support feature for many of our customers. Retailers are eager to better connect and understand their customers. What easier way is there to connect with your customers and deliver fast service than via live chat? There are often barriers for customers to find and purchase the products they’re looking for. Support technology is helping to make this discovery process easier.

It was promising to see and hear the up-leveling of customer service as a key business differentiator in retail. We can’t wait for what next year’s IRCE has in store. To learn more about Zendesk’s social, mobile and live chat features, visit here.

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