Software Startup Helps Customers Think Green, Save Green

“With Zendesk, we’re hoping to build a vibrant online community among our customers, increasing their satisfaction while saving us time.”

–Peter James, Head of Propaganda and Propagation

Carbon Guerrilla is passionate about helping businesses record, track, and manage carbon emissions. The company’s cloud-based solution allows companies to access a powerful, scalable system designed to accurately measure carbon, produce incisive management reports, and highlight areas for improvement. Carbon Guerrilla helps businesses achieve significant cost savings while adhering to the latest carbon compliance legislation and demonstrating their green credentials.

Environmental mandate creates a need for carbon accounting tools

When the United Kingdom’s Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRCEES) went into effect in April 2010, the nation’s larger companies scrambled to find tools that would help them measure and optimize their carbon emissions. Several major vendors responded by rolling out powerful new solutions—often with a hefty price tag.

Startup Carbon Guerrilla took a different approach, and from its inception in March 2010, Carbon Guerrilla has aimed to put carbon accounting tools into the hands of as many companies as possible, at an affordable price.

“We’re addressing the carbon emissions issue from the ground up—hence our company name,” explains Peter James, head of propaganda and propagation at Carbon Guerrilla. “We want to help companies of all sizes reduce their carbon output—not just because they may be required to, but also because it can help their businesses run more efficiently.”

Carbon Guerrilla faced the challenge of creating a robust carbon accounting platform from scratch and needed to implement a support solution to manage its software development process and handle support tickets from customers.

Centralized online support solution puts information at the fingertips

Carbon Guerrilla had a clear list of priorities in mind for its support solution. As a small company with a distributed workforce, “anytime, anywhere” access was a major requirement. Carbon Guerrilla also wanted real-time information on all of its support tickets. In the end, James made his decision based on personal and professional referrals.

“My brother had used Zendesk before and was always singing its praises,” James says. “As soon as I checked out Zendesk, I loved not only the features and functionality, but also the company’s accessible, customer-focused approach. It reminded me of my own company’s philosophy.”

Carbon Guerrilla began using Zendesk in May 2010 and soon realized what made Zendesk different from other products.

“On other solutions, tickets get stuck in the system, and it’s difficult to figure out how information should be uploaded and where it’s actually stored. Zendesk is the opposite. Everything is centralized, and you can get information from wherever you are—as long as you’re connected to the internet.”

Startup speeds product to market, keeps new customers in the loop

As planned, Carbon Guerrilla initially used Zendesk to handle support tickets from its own developers as they built their carbon accounting solution from the ground up.

“There were tickets coming in from all different members of our development team,” James recalls. “Having Zendesk enabled us to keep track of bugs and other issues so that we could resolve them quickly and get our product out to a very hungry market.”

Now that Carbon Guerrilla’s customer base is steadily increasing, Zendesk’s scalable solution empowers the company to manage support requests from across the country. For example, Carbon Guerrilla’s customers often need help uploading their data into the company’s powerful platform.

“Customers who subscribe to our Platinum plan have an impressive array of features at their disposal,” says James. “We get lots of ‘how do I?’ questions. Everything comes in through Zendesk, which makes it easy for us to route and escalate tickets across our three tiers of support.”

Meanwhile, Carbon Guerrilla uses Zendesk’s multi-channel support with community forums to present FAQs, streamlining the workload for its support staff. Any customer may post a query or read previous answers.

“We ask our customers to post their questions on our forums, in the hopes that our answers will benefit our entire user base,” James says. “With Zendesk, we’re hoping to build a vibrant online community among our customers, increasing their satisfaction while saving us time.”

As more UK organizations gear up for an April 2011 reporting deadline on their carbon emissions, Carbon Guerrilla is confident that its Zendesk help desk support software will accommodate a growing customer base.

“To a startup like ours that’s very much in growth mode, Zendesk is the ideal business partner,” James concludes. “We wouldn’t have had our product on the market so quickly without Zendesk’s solution. Frankly, we’re hoping to grow our company as quickly and successfully as Zendesk has grown theirs.”