Based in Trenton, NJ, TerraCycle makes affordable, eco-friendly products from a wide range of non- recyclable waste materials. With more than 50 products available at major retailers like Walmart, Target, The Home Depot, OfficeMax, Petco and Whole Foods Market, TerraCycle is one of the fastest growing eco-friendly manufacturers in the world. The company hopes to eliminate the idea of waste by finding innovative, unique uses for materials that others deem garbage.

Seeking Help Desk 2.0

Nobody will ever accuse TerraCycle’s leaders of lacking vision. The company’s long-term goal is to find a way to recycle or reuse virtually any type of waste that typically ends up in a landfill—and to help charitable organizations in the process. To that end, TerraCycle coordinates projects for dozens of employees and global partner companies as they develop new products made out of discarded materials.

“As our company grows, our support requests are increasing exponentially,” says Billy Catherall, IT Director, TerraCycle. “Basecamp is a very good tool, but it didn’t have the flexibility and tracking ability we were looking for in a ticketing system. And as a recycling company, we really didn’t want to keep wasting paper in our IT processes.”

Eliminating Paper Trails

It only took TerraCycle’s IT department one week to move completely to Zendesk and to start tracking requests in the system.

“Within weeks, our finance and creative departments were asking us how they could use Zendesk to get rid of their paper trails, too,” recalls Catherall. “Over my 20 years in IT, I’ve worked with a lot of ticketing systems, and they usually get either the functionality right or the user interface right. Zendesk got both right.”

Distributing Communication Worldwide

TerraCycle’s IT team finds Zendesk especially helpful in managing large development projects. Internal customers often must share detailed feature requests with developers who are adding functionality to the company’s website. Zendesk helps IT keep track of these conversations.

“We sometimes have 15 to 20 comments back and forth about specifications before our developers can begin working on a new project,” Catherall explains. “Our end users have noticed a big improvement in communication since we started using Zendesk to centralize those conversations. We can easily break out complex requests into several smaller requests and continue discussions along each thread.”

During TerraCycle’s global expansion, Catherall is counting on Zendesk to streamline the process of providing technical support for these and other technology enhancements.

“Being able to tie everyone into a centralized ticketing system across nationalities is huge,” says Catherall. “That’s why Zendesk’s integration with other products was such a major factor in our selection.”