Zendesk

Six Surefire Tips to Retain and Grow Customers

JD Peterson — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:43:45 +0000

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a great webinar with our friends from Totango. Totango makes a customer engagement platform for cloud-based businesses. What does that mean? Among other things, it means they help cloud businesses like Zendesk understand and measure how customers are using a product. We have been using Totango for over a year now and have a much better understanding of how our active customers and trial users are interacting with their Zendesks.

The insights learned from Totango combined with the power of Zendesk and our focus on exceptional customer service has led to some phenomenal results in keeping our customers happy and coming back for more. In our recent webinar, we shared some of our learnings and gave some practical advice on how to use technology and best practices to improve retention and unlock growth from your customers. Along with Totango VP of Marketing Dominque Levin, we shared the following surefire tips:

Focus on customer engagement (not just support)
Build a cross-functional customer success team
Deliver personalized content
Enable multi-channel support options
Let the data be your guide — analyze the key metrics that matter
Unleash company-wide participation when it comes to customer service and engagement

Of course, each one of these tips requires some further explanation and encompasses sets of activities that you can easily put into practice. For more details and to explore this topic further, check out the recorded version of our webinar! Or, if you are a cloud-based business give us a call; we would love to talk to you further about how you can accelerate revenue and build better customer relationships using Zendesk and Totango.

5,000 Fabulous Customers in Europe and a New Office in London!

Tiffany Maleshefski — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:53:38 +0000

Today, we have reached an incredible milestone: 5,000 customers in Europe. This is huge, especially when you take into consideration we only opened our European headquarters less than a year ago. Our 5,000th customer is a social gaming company, We R Interactive. The company is using Zendesk to support the global user base for its first game, I AM PLAYR and upcoming new music and sports games. They join the likes of Demonware and Rovio (those brilliant creators behind Angry Birds), also customers of ours in Europe, who are taking the gaming industry to the next level up as well.

We opened our UK office in June of last year and in that time managed to double our number of European customers. To see how Zendesk and our customer service philosophy has been embraced by European businesses, both large and small, has been very validating.

Some of the fantastic European-based customers who have joined the Zendesk family include:

Telco -O2
KPN
Orange
Travel Thomas Cook
Ecotour
Shopzilla
Shazam
Tigi Haircare
La Poste
Figaro
Libero
Virgin
Diesel

New Offices in Paddington

We’re also thrilled to unveil our brand new offices in Paddington.

London is clearly the place to be right now. The Summer Olympics are right around the corner as is the Queen’s Jubilee. And of course there is the GREAT campaign that is underway, which has done a wonderful job highlighting the UK’s vibrant innovation scene, especially when it comes to technology.

The UK is Europe’s leading market for software and IT services and London has more software and IT services companies than any major US city. So given all this, Zendesk is really excited to be here.

And to show our gratitude for the warm welcome we’ve received so far, Zendesk UK will be working with local Paddington charities St. Mungos and COSMIC (Children of St Mary’s Intensive Care). The company’s involvement will extend beyond donations, with the team working closely with each charity to help them in whatever way is necessary, whether that be marketing, fundraising or volunteering.

Zendesk is a keen advocate in giving back to the community. It also runs an Incubator Partners programme, which serves Europe’s ever-growing start-up community by offering free access to the Zendesk Plus+ plan for a year. Incubator Partners, such as Team Europe Ventures, Le Camping, hackFWD, TechHub, Techcelerate and Seedcamp, help encourage more start-ups to follow some of the best practices around customer service. More than 100 start-ups are already using Zendesk’s free software, totaling approximately £260,000 worth of investment from the company so far.

Thank you Europe. We hope we can make your customer service even more awesome in the years to come.

Denver, Austin, Chicago…We’re Coming! (be on the lookout for green capes)

JD Peterson — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:30:34 +0000

We love our customers (and potential customers)! We love meeting and getting to know them. We love sharing knowledge and best practices with them. We love eating and drinking with them.

At Zendesk we are constantly trying to find new ways to get out of the office and do the things that we love. Back in March, we came up with a great way to do these things by launching our first ever Customer Service Hero Tour! Along with some great friends of ours from Zappos and Groupon, we rocked the west coast and hit Los Angeles, Seattle, and our hometown of San Francisco.

Hundreds of wonderful companies came out to join us and it really shattered our expectations of what was possible when you put a bunch of passionate, customer focused people in a room together. Personally, I was inspired by tales from the inside of Zappos, enlightened by some of the creative ways people are using Zendesk, appalled by some of the horror stories of “the old ways” that companies used to provide customer service, and amazed that some of my jokes actually led to audible laughter!

So I am beyond excited that we are about to hit the road again! Tour stops this time will bring us to the rugged Rocky Mountains, the always active (and weird…in the good way) capital of Texas, and to the home of deep dish pizza and Oprah Winfrey. We’re coming packed with new customer stories, exciting findings from our customer service benchmarks, a best-selling author (check out Micah Solomon’s new book here), and much more. And yes, delicious free drinks will be on the menu.

Learn how you, too, can be a hero to your customers. Join us in Denver, Austin, or Chicago!

You can find out more about the Hero Tour here.

Tip of the Week: Managing Tickets with the Mail API

Sean Kinney — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:30:26 +0000

We recently announced a new version of the Mail API that offers more flexibility in managing tickets via email! The Mail API can improve your workflow by using it to assign tickets to yourself or a group when replying to customers, marking tickets as solved, or adding private comments to tickets.

If you’re already an avid user of the Mail API, the single biggest change is a switch from putting commands in the email subject to putting them in the beginning of the email body, and we’ve also added shortcuts for some of the longer commands. You can learn new commands in our Mail API documentation, request special features in our Feature Request forum, or find out more about the Mail API here!

Paris Meetup, May 14th

Cori Hemmah — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:00:47 +0000

Bonjour Paris!

You’re invited to join our French team next Monday, May 14th between 6pm and 9pm at Prescription Cocktail Club! Zendesk lovers, aficionados, customers and partners have the opportunity to share customer service tips and best practices and enjoy delicious cocktails where, as always, the tab will be on Zendesk!

Space is limited so register for your spot now!

Zendesk + Community = Love

Marissa Root — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:30:32 +0000

Here at Zendesk we believe in maintaining open and transparent communication with our customers – and by association, the customers of our customers – all 65 million of them! With all the different channels our customers can choose to communicate with us, we think it’s essential to listen to what our community says about our product, service and company as a whole.

We make a valiant effort to respond to all questions, comments or feedback whether it’s on our support page, Twitter, Facebook, or our own forums, just to name a few. Everyday we feel (and appreciate!) the love from the people that know us best – our customers. Whether it’s agents we support in over 137 countries or a startup who we give Zendesk to for free – we constantly strive to support those who use and love our product.

So with that in mind, I cannot express how excited I am to join the Zendesk team as their new Community Evangelist. I will be responsible for listening to what our community has to say, addressing comments and questions that come our way and hanging out in our forums. I’ll also be popping up at events and sharing all things Zendesk on Twitter, Facebook, Quora or Instagram, and feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.

Thanks for staying classy, Zendesk Nation, and keep spreading the #zenlove!

Dear Harvest: You’ll Always Be Our First

Jessica Greene-Pierson — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:30:03 +0000

We’re big fans of celebrating milestones here at Zendesk, and now that we have more than 90 integrations we thought it was a good time to look back and celebrate our very first and one of our most popular: Harvest for Zendesk!

We first integrated with Harvest back in February 2008. Harvest serves the time tracking and billing needs of thousands of customers from around the world, from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. Customers love it because it makes tracking the amount of time spent on answering and resolving customer service inquiries a breeze. And now a recent update to the integration makes it easier than ever, with features such as:

A new start/stop timer that makes it easy to track the amount of time spent on a specific ticket
New shared login session with Harvest means once you log into Harvest via the widget, you’re automatically logged into both systems
Projects and tasks for a new time entry are automatically matched, and can be configured to match your most frequently used projects or tasks
A quick link back to the Harvest timesheet for logged in Harvest users, as well as a quick link back to that associated Zendesk ticket from Harvest time entry

Learn more about Harvest for Zendesk, including how to get started, in our forum post!

Customer Celebration, May 10th

Cori Hemmah — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:19 +0000

Come join us for a customer celebration this Thursday, May 10th in our new Copenhagen office!

Zendesk customers, partners, lovers and friends are welcome to join us from 5 to 9pm for an evening of exciting festivities! The entire Danish engineering team will be joined by Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane as guests are treated to a dazzling DJ, nifty networking and crafty cocktails! An interview will also take place during the event that will be aired live on TV2 News.

This is an event you won’t want to miss, so make sure to register for you spot now!

Five New May Integrations

Eric Shen — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:30:58 +0000

It’s May, and to get the spring kicked off we wanted to take the time to highlight some of the latest integrations that we’ve added to help extend the functionality of your Zendesk help desk!

ClickDesk

ClickDesk provides a combination of live chat, VoIP calling, and a social toolbar all wrapped up into one nice, easy to use panel on your website. Your customers and website visitors can chat live with an agent from your company and your agents can reply via their native chat clients like Google talk or Skype. Customers also get fast and direct access to your Facebook or Twitter feed to share their support experience, and since ClickDesk offers phone numbers in over 40 countries they can call your support agents directly via the chat panel.

With the Zendesk integration your agents can view the history of tickets a person has submitted as soon as they request a chat session. When the chat session is complete, you can even create a new ticket or update an existing ticket with the latest conversation details right from the chat window without the need to login to the Zendesk help desk. Not available to chat? Not a problem! Any messages sent while offline are automatically forwarded into your Zendesk account to create a ticket.

Leftronic

Leftronic helps companies monitor all of their key metrics through beautiful visualizations and an easy-to-use API for pushing custom data to a browser-based dashboard! The app pulls data from Zendesk (along with Google Analytics, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Twitter, and many others) to give viewers a real-time, high-level view of every aspect of their companies.

For Zendesk, Leftronic created a custom, easy to set up dashboard that includes metrics focused around your support team. You can display items such as the number of open tickets, a list of unassigned tickets, top performing agents, and even your satisfaction ratings. You can add and remove, rearrange, and resize the widgets on your dashboard, and since they are based on the Zendesk views that you already know and use, configuration is a snap. Leftronic has even included a pre-built template that can get you started with just one click.

Mediaburst

Mediaburst is a UK based company that provides web-based SMS services in over 150 countries that allows you to easily manage your SMS contact list and schedule SMS messages to be sent out to your customer base.

The Zendesk integration can be configured in conjunction with triggers to send an SMS message with ticket information based on different events in the Zendesk system. Events such as creation of a new ticket, update on an existing ticket, ticket resolution and more are supported and can quickly send an SMS to the customer. You determine when and what you want to communicate via SMS, and Mediaburst and Zendesk take care of the rest to help open up this new communication channel for your customer base.

mySurveyLab

mySurveyLab is a professional online survey tool that supports survey creation, response collection and real time reports generation in multiple languages (including right-to-left written languages)! You can create custom branded surveys to reflect the look and feel of your company that may include an unlimited number of responses and questions, advanced question logic, and the ability to easily report on survey results.

It’s easy to embed a link to a survey in your Zendesk ticket responses or queue up a specific trigger to send out a survey link after a support ticket has been closed. The integration also allows you to make use of a custom field in mySurveyLab reports that can store any information you wish to pass from a Zendesk ticket. Want to see what ticket the survey was related to? Configure the results to pass this information when the survey gets sent out. You can add any value that is available as a placeholder on a Zendesk ticket and utilize this to report back on each survey result.

TissueApp

Have you ever wanted to escalate a Zendesk ticket right into your Github issue bug tracker? Well, now you can with TissueApp, a totally free web application designed to help you synchronize your Zendesk tickets and GitHub issues!

TissueApp facilitates a real time, two way communication stream between GitHub issues and Zendesk tickets through a Zendesk target where escalating a ticket from Zendesk to GitHub issues could be as simple as tagging a ticket with the word “Github.” The configuration of the criteria to send an issue is, of course, completely up to you, but TissueApp helps to connect the two services and ensures that comments made in a Zendesk ticket or Github issue are pushed to both systems so you can see updates your developers may have made on a support issue.

You can check out all of our integrations here!