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Moonfruit is the United Kingdom’s leading hosted website builder. The company makes it easy for anyone to set up business or personal websites. Moonfruit has a rapidly growing user base around the world – in fact, one-third of Moonfruit’s users are located in the United States. Customers have used Moonfruit’s design software to build more than 3 million websites.

Corporate rebranding spurs a new approach to customer support

Long before the first dot-com boom, Wendy Tan White launched Moonfruit to let people build websites without having to learn coding skills. Moonfruit survived after the burst of the dot-com bubble because its customers appreciated the company’s easy-to-use website-building tools.

“Our core customers are businesses, ranging from sole proprietorships to e-commerce companies,” says Wendy Tan White, founder and CMO, Moonfruit. “Regardless of their size, they care about good design and powerful features – but they want it all to be easy.”

When Moonfruit recently re-branded itself and overhauled its website, the company also took a closer look at its customer support processes. It soon became obvious that Moonfruit’s support applications weren’t making things as easy as possible for customers.

“We had been using an open source ticketing system that worked pretty well, but it wasn’t designed to let us share ticket resolutions with the public,” White explains. “It also didn’t integrate with social media streams, or with our support forums and FAQ tool. That meant lots of extra clicks for our customers.”

Customizable support solution matches company’s new look

When Moonfruit began to evaluate online customer support systems, Zendesk quickly stood out from the pack. Zendesk was the only solution that delivered all of the requirements that Moonfruit was looking for.

“With Zendesk, we knew we would get our knowledge base, Q&A forums, and ticketing functionality under one roof,” says White. “The fact that Zendesk allows the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to support our branding was the clincher.”

Moonfruit then engaged a boutique web design studio to perform heavy customizations of the company’s support pages and Zendesk site. The goal? Make support pages indistinguishable from the rest of the company’s vivid new website.

“We have very specific brand guidelines and didn’t want to compromise on our support pages,” says White. “With Zendesk, we didn’t have to. We used Zendesk’s APIs and pushed the limits of CSS and JavaScript to make those pages match our brand perfectly.”

To make life even easier for its customers, Moonfruit made one final customization: single sign-on. Moonfruit customers can now access support features through Zendesk without logging on separately. Customers’ Moonfruit profiles are automatically pushed to Zendesk, reinforcing the company’s emphasis on building a sense of community among its users.

Powerful search tools put answers at users’ fingertips

When Moonfruit went live on Zendesk, the company pushed its knowledge base of support information into Zendesk. Today, customers can easily search across all article, question and idea forums, often finding their own answers. And when they do submit support tickets, customers can track the process of these requests online.

“Customers are already telling us they love being able to find solutions online,” says White. “Our resellers and other power users will also be able to post articles and build our knowledge base in order to help other customers find answers for themselves. This will save our support agents a lot of time because they won’t be answering the same basic questions over and over.”

In addition, Moonfruit uses Zendesk’s Twitter integration to turn tweets from its 19,000 followers into support tickets. As Moonfruit expands its global customer base, time-saving tools like these will become more and more important.

“We have 300,000 users around the world, and they’ve built more than 3 million sites,” White concludes. “Our growth shows no signs of slowing down. That’s why we’re glad to have a trusted business partner like Zendesk on our side.”