This week we launched Zendesk for iPad. It is great and beautiful and you should download it. But this post isn’t about Zendesk for iPad directly. It is about how you can better use your iPad as a customer service tool. Don’t have an iPad? Show this post to your support manager to make a case that you and the rest of your support team would benefit from one

More and more apps are released each day — making iPad more attractive to the business community. Below are a few apps we think could enhance your use of Zendesk for iPad and your overall customer support.

Remote Access: LogMeIn Ignition

LogMeIn Ignition is one of the top paid apps in the iTunes App store. And with good reason – it allows you to securely access your work computer (or any computer really) from your iPad. Out in the field and forgot some crucial information on your desktop at work? Switch over to LogMeIn ignition and you’ll see your desktop and are able to do anything you could do if you were sitting right there in the office.

Bonus LogMeIn tip: you can use LogMeIn’s other remote access tool – Rescue – to remotely connect to iPads. If your company has started using iPads and needs you to support them, this is crucial. And, of course, you can tie your LogMeIn Rescue with your Zendesk, so the whole thing stays in your support workflow.

Analytics: Geckoboard

It’s hard to support a service or product if you don’t know how that service or products is doing. Geckoboard is a web app (with an optimized iPad interface) that gives you all the various business analytics you could hope for including Google Analytics (site traffic), pingdom (server uptime), Zendesk (ticket activity), and many more.

If you’re out of the office, for instance, but check Geckoboard on your iPad and see that you’re site is experiencing some downtime, you can switch into Zendesk and fire off an urgent ticket to your ops team. Critical.

Team Communication: Chatter Mobile

Many companies, including us here at Zendesk, use Salesforce for their CRM. Salesforce recently introduced an internal communication and chat service called Chatter. Chatter feels a lot like a company Facebook – team members post updates, photos, files, all of which show up in a familiar activity stream style.

The iPad app was custom built for the platform. Use it to keep in touch with what’s going on in the home office. Our support team spends all day with a group chat window open – asking questions about possible bugs, customers, how to accomplish certain tasks in our application – they shouldn’t have to be cut off when they go mobile.

Bonus team communication app: Yammer

While they haven’t built an iPad app specifically, the crew over at Yammer has built a nice iPhone app that you can use on the iPad app. And the Yammer platform is a great option for team communication.

Task Management: ToDo for iPad

How people handle their to-do items on the iPad can be an almost religious discussion. Whatever you use, you’ll offer better support and be more responsive if you track your to-do list somewhere. And if you can integrate that to-do list with your support tool? All the better.

If you use ToDo for iPad, you can integrate your Zendesk tasks with it. Using targets and triggers within Zendesk, you can create a new task in ToDo by emailing over any ticket that is marked as a task assigned to you. (Note: requires the additional Todo Online service.)

Business Productivity (Super Bonus Nerd Tip!): Simplenote + TextExpander

Ok, this one is for the real productivity nerds. Want to really trick out your workflow? Use Simplenote, the premier iPad note taking app in conjunction with TextExpander touch – the famed typing shortcut utility; and connect those to your Zendesk through targets.

How? Here’s a breakdown: simply set up a Zendesk target and trigger to create a note in Simplenote through email (a feature available to premium Simplenote accounts). Edit that note in Simplenote (using TextExpander to make typing faster) and it will sync back to your desktop and iPhone.

Why would you want to do this? Well, first and foremost, you love tools; second, you want to use the ticket as the basis for a macro or a forum post. By getting that ticket into Simplenote, you’ll be able to treat it like a text document – edit it, add to it – and you’ll be able to access it later at the office through the Simplenote web app. If you want to leave that laptop at home, but still want to do some heavier knowledgebase content creation or text editing, this combo is killer.

Learn more about using your iPad as a customer support tool — sign up for our Zendesk for iPad webinar.