Your moment of Zen(desk) with COO Zack Urlocker on, “What is Zendesk?”
“By having the largest customer service network in the world, we are in a unique position to spot trends quickly.”
Zendesk is customer service software based in the cloud. It features a simple interface that will feel familiar to users. To enhance the customer experience, Zendesk integrates other cloud based services like Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter.
// ]]>
In an otherwise boring and predictable industry, Zendesk has a ton of personality. Their videos and infographics bring a little levity to the help desk space.
Zendesk uses widgets and plugins to enhance your ability to meet customer’s needs. You can check them out in the free demo.
I love a company that offers value to build relationships with customers rather than just trying to overtly sell their products. Zendesk excels with webinars like “6 Surefire Tips to Retain & Grow Customers”, “I Love You More Than My Dog” and “Best Practices for Running a Global Helpdesk”.
I recently had the chance to ask Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker a few questions. He shared the latest from Zendesk and spoke to trends in help desk and customer service software. Sales, Marketing, Customer Support and Development are all areas of the Zendesk business that fall under Urlocker’s watch. Right in-line with current trends, Urlocker also uses his position to educate and write about disruptive business models and technology.
Q: Zendesk is more than help desk software. What is Zendesk?
What is Zendesk - Zack Urlocker, COO
A: Zendesk is the proven cloud-based customer support software that is the fastest way to enable great customer service in rapidly growing companies. Zendesk is so easy to use, it’s loved by support teams and their customers worldwide. More than 15,000 organizations including Adobe, Sony, and Groupon, trust Zendesk with their most valuable assets: their customers, partners, and employees. Now, organizations can deliver exceptional support and proactively engage customers across the web, email, and social media. With the mobile device explosion having created even more opportunities to help customers anywhere, anytime, Zendesk is also available across devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire, and BlackBerry.
Q: What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in the help desk space?
A: Social media has created a newly empowered “collective” customer. As a result, customers, not companies, are controlling how customer service policies are created and implemented. Due to the ever-growing power of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, bad news can travel extremely fast. This “consumer awakening” that has happened on social media has required that today’s companies be responsive, transparent, open, and authentic when communicating with customers. When mistakes happen, companies need to own the issue and proactively engage with their customers with a sincere and honest tone. Even if companies aren’t able to fully resolve issues during the first contact, it’s important to reach out and acknowledge that the issue exists and that you are working on a solution.
We’ve responded to this trend with a Twitter integration that allows customers to turn tweets into working customer support tickets, or as we like to call them, twickets. Meanwhile, our Facebook integration lets customers turn comments made on their company Facebook page into customer support tickets as well.
In addition to social media, companies today must be prepared to field support issues via phone, email, their websites, and blogs. There was a time when toll-free numbers were all a company needed to manage disgruntled customers. Today’s customers have various ways to communicate with companies–and they use every single one. If companies aren’t diligent about providing and monitoring all of these channels, the likelihood of something spinning out of control is high.
Because of the multiple ways customers want to communicate with companies, companies need a unified tool for monitoring and responding to customer service issues to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.
Q: How does mobile and BYOD fit into your business model and user data?
What is Zendesk: Kindle Screen
A: From our own experience, with more than 100,000 Zendesk mobile app downloads, the presence of mobile applications for business purposes is proving to be a powerful force that cannot be ignored. It is important that customer service solutions are available across devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Kindle Fire.
We want organizations to have the ability to provide support on-the-go regardless of their preferred mobile device. Our mobile apps provide the greatest flexibility for customer support agents to easily view, update and manage support requests anytime, from anywhere — in real time. Zendesk’s mobile apps give agents the same visibility into their company’s customer service activity as they would from the desktop interface – allowing them to easily view and manage tickets while on the go, no matter the source – including Twitter and Facebook.
We pride ourselves on staying abreast of the hottest mobile trends and delivering Zendesk optimized for the most popular devices, such as the iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle Fire. Meanwhile, an optimized version of our app for iPad 3 is in development.
Q: What is the importance of your integrations with document sharing and other add ons?
A: Zendesk has more than 90 out-of-the-box integrations making it easy to connect Zendesk to other critical business solutions. For example, Zendesk works with the leading CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Highrise, and Netsuite to provide both the sales and customer service organizations a complete view of all customer interactions. Meanwhile, our Atlassian JIRA integration seamlessly connects support agents and developers so that they can easily collaborate, edit, update, or resolve any kind of customer support issue within Zendesk or JIRA.
From document sharing offerings such as Box or Dropbox to analytic tools such as GoodData and Google Analytics to communication tools such as MailChimp, we help ensure that the best customer service product tightly integrates with the best business solutions available. We also have a very open API and offer a number of ways to integrate and extend Zendesk’s functionality. There are five APIs that can be leveraged to build custom apps and perform seamless integrations with a multitude of systems.
Scalability seems to be one of the big selling points of Zendesk. What else makes your solution unique?
For starters, we have a culture of constant innovation and rapid development where we quickly deliver on the key feature our customers are requesting, with new ones being rolled out almost every week.
By having the largest customer service network in the world, we are in a unique position to spot trends quickly. In fact, we have recently introduced the Zendesk Customer Satisfaction Index which measures customer happiness across 65 million consumers in 137 different countries. Most important, however, is that we provide the tools as well as the know-how in order to deliver a great customer experience.
The Customer Satisfaction Index offers valuable data and insight into customer trends so companies can respond and build a customer service strategy accordingly. Zendesk plans to publish its Customer Satisfaction Index on a quarterly basis and will report on additional data such as customer service efficiency and quality in various industries, geographies and company sizes. Meanwhile, the Zendesk Benchmark allows companies to compare key help desk metrics with thousands of others and compare themselves against their industry peers or similarly sized companies.
Ultimately, Zendesk’s destination is to be the provider of true customer intelligence and engagement, empowering any company to deliver on a great service promise.
Q: How valuable are your self service tools to customers?
A: Self-service customer support has become one of the most powerful trends shaping the industry in 2012. Companies who can help customers independently find the answers to their questions can dramatically increase customer satisfaction, while lowering support costs.
One of Zendesk’s more powerful features is its ability to analyze customer usage of knowledge bases and forums. With these analyses companies can understand which content is most valuable. All of this information is shown in an easy-to-read dashboard, making it easy to take action based on this information.
And, then, there is the “silent” customer; this is the customer who gets to your knowledge base and gives up because he or she couldn’t find what was needed. Self-service customer support is only valuable to a company if you know what is working and what is not. Up until now, there wasn’t an easy, measurable way to see if customers are effectively finding the answers they need via self-service content.
Zendesk Search Analytics
With that said, Zendesk’s Search Analytics feature provides customer service organizations with insight into how customers try to help themselves through self-service content. Search Analytics gives companies direct insight into how their customers are using self-service content, where they run into problems, and when they give up. This information can help a company optimize its self-service content.
Q: How do you compare to other help desk systems, like Kayako (or other specific competitors).
A: While this category has been around for a long time, what makes Zendesk unique is a strong self-service portal (including knowledge base, discussion forums, and ideas forums) that we support on all available customer communication channels, such as email, phone, chat, websites, self-service portals and social media (including Twitter and Facebook).
Our product is so easy to use, it enables companies of all sizes to deliver great customer support fast. But where it really shines is how quickly companies can get results.
For instance, while customer satisfaction ratings and surveys are a popular way among companies for measuring customer happiness, surveys can offer a false sense of security. Zendesk’s Customer Satisfaction Rating feature gives a very black-and-white view into whether a customer is satisfied. After a customer service request is solved, companies can automatically contact their customers through Zendesk to collect feedback on whether they were satisfied with the service they received or not. The customer can elaborate as to why. Using this instant feedback, companies can continually monitor overall customer satisfaction and maintain an active and ongoing customer-centric way of doing business.
