Fiverr™ is the world’s largest marketplace for services starting at as little as $5. The site lists close to a million services (called “Gigs™”) from the very quirky to the business essentials. Becoming a seller takes approximately two minutes and ordering a service is even faster.

“Fiverr is redefining the way people work online,” says Micha Kaufman, Fiverr’s CEO. “It allows anyone to turn their skills, talents and resources into income in a matter of minutes. You can think of it as the eBay™ for the services economy.”

Since its launch in 2010, Fiverr has been growing rapidly, serving millions of customers from over 200 countries worldwide. The site is ranked one of the Internet’s top 200 websites and one of the 100 most popular websites in the US. Fiverr has been featured in TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, Forbes, CNN, MSNBC and USA Today and many more.

“Fiverr is a social services network,” explains Reuben Furmanski, Head of Customer Support at Fiverr. “As a P2P marketplace, it is all about the liquidity of demand and supply – putting people from all around the world in one place to exchange skills with necessities. Making sure that everything is streamlined and everyone is happy is what my team is here for and the communication tool that we’ve chosen is Zendesk.”

Driving micro-entrepreneurship

Furmanski, who set up the customer support department at Fiverr in 2010, turned to Zendesk at a time of rapid company growth.

“As our website became more popular, the number of customer inquiries grew. We needed to manage the increased volume and streamline our responses while maintaining the personal touch,” he says. “Our co-founders, Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger, came across Zendesk and we implemented it very quickly across the business.”

Fiverr currently uses a number of Zendesk features, including tagging, macros, API, Feedback tab integration, FAQs, intra-company communications, and knowledge base/customer forums.

“Zendesk is robust and easy to use – anyone could learn how to use it,” comments Furmanski.

In fact, the Zendesk software plays a double role at Fiverr, as it is used for both customer and team support.

“Our customer support team uses Zendesk to deal with a range of requests, from helping a seller to check his or her account balance to advising a buyer how to complete an order,” Furmanski explains. “In addition, our founders, editors and developers use the software to exchange information among teams.”

Personal touch

Furmanski acknowledges that Zendesk has helped Fiverr set up crucial processes that drive the company’s personal touch when it comes to customer service and user experience.

“Zendesk has enabled us to develop work protocols and become more methodical,” he explains. ‘However, while we measure response times, it isn’t our aim to close a ticket as quickly as possible. We want to make sure we handle the buyer’s or seller’s query properly and resolve the query to the customer’s satisfaction. It’s all about creating a wonderful user experience for anyone in the Fiverr community through customized and effective communication.”

“We encourage our customers to talk to us and they appreciate the fact that they receive an answer within minutes from a real person rather than from a machine. We’ve had positive feedback from customers who have gone through our support channels.”

In fact, one Fiverr seller comments on the company’s blog: “It’s really nice to know they’re real people and are concerned about how we’re doing.”

As the world’s largest marketplace for services moves forward, Zendesk will continue to play a key role at Fiverr.

“I attended a Zendesk training session recently and it was very useful to see what other companies were doing with the software,” adds Furmanski. “It’s good to know that Zendesk is always enhancing its product as that means we can expand the support we give to our buyers and sellers over time.”