Headquartered in San Francisco, Dropbox simplifies millions of people’s lives by providing them access to their documents, photos, and videos anywhere—as well as the ability to share them easily. More than 25 million users in 175 countries save 200 million files on Dropbox each day. Dropbox was founded in 2007 and has raised $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Y Combinator. As the company has grown, so has its volume of support tickets.

Flexible online help desk meets the need for speed

It’s hard to believe Dropbox began as a tool to help two college students use files on multiple computers. Today, more than 25 million users worldwide rely on Dropbox to share and store files – and they’re submitting hundreds of customer support tickets each day.

“We initially addressed support via email,” recalls Graham Abbott, Support Engineer, Dropbox. “But there were no workflows, it was tough to add comments, and we were wasting far too much time copying and pasting user information. As our growth continued, something had to give.”

Dropbox unveiled its Zendesk customer support system in April 2009. Since then, the company has used Zendesk as a platform for ongoing efficiency gains.

“We’re obsessed with speed,” Abbott explains. “Zendesk has enabled us to keep tightening our processes as we address up to 1,000 tickets per day.”

APIs and widgets boost agent productivity

As Dropbox works to shave seconds from its support processes, Zendesk’s APIs allow the company to build custom tools that extend Zendesk’s functionality. One such tool lets agents open multiple tickets in separate browser tabs. From there, they can use keyboard shortcuts to perform common tasks, such as taking ownership of a ticket to avoid “collisions” with other agents or skipping to the next ticket.

Another tool, built using Zendesk’s JavaScript API, interacts with Google Translate to automatically detect the language of incoming ticket comments and translate them to English. Agents can then enter their response in English and click a button to translate the message back into the customer’s language.

Dropbox has also built multiple JavaScript widget that lets agents see a customer’s Dropbox account information – such as account status, hardware, operating system, and usage details – within Zendesk. Having this information at their fingertips enables Dropbox’s agents to proactively assess potential issues with the user’s account.

“Zendesk APIs and widgets are a major win for us,” says Abbott. “They let us tap into massive amounts of back-end information to add more functionality to Zendesk.”

In addition, Zendesk’s cascading style sheet (CSS) capabilities have allowed Dropbox to customize its help desk to look like the Dropbox website. Meanwhile, Zendesk’s macros enable more personalized, conversational email notifications.

“Using Zendesk widgets, APIs, and macros, as well as CSS and JavaScript, we’re not only responding to tickets faster, but also developing a closer connection with our users,” Abbott remarks.

Dropbox believes its customer support has improved with Zendesk – but that won’t stop the company from innovating.

“We’re always looking for new ways to shave a second or two off a process,” Abbott explains. “With Zendesk, we’ve made strides in terms of average response time and ticket age, and we’re continually enhancing our processes for even greater responsiveness.”