Zendesk gets it.
They have drunk the 37signals Kool Aid and are now serving up a monthly online subscription-based help desk ticketing system which
- is elegant and simple in design
- is well-thought-out, with battle-tested features
- has key Web 2.0 elements “baked in” that make for “joy of use” and increase efficiency (e.g., tags, smart folders, RSS, built in Ruby on Rails for speedy responsiveness exceeding traditional fat client desktop apps, etc.)
Om Malik writes in his blog: “Just like 37Signals offers you project management tools or hosted chat, Zendesk offers you a simple way to manage all incoming help desk inquires.” And Zendesk just got US$.5m in funding from private/angel investors, including Christophe Janz, from my favorite web-top RSS reader, Pageflakes.
I had dinner with one of the key people behind Zendesk last week, Michael Hansen, and the more I hear, the better I like it. Check out this video describing the features:
The key features and benefits of Zendesk seem to be:
- Tight integration with email.
- Very cool implementation of tags to be used by a group–more than a simple folksonomy (which is “anarchy by design”–fine for Flickr, but not fine for enterprise knowledge management). It seems to suggest “most popular” tags. Why tags are revolutionary: folders force you to file items (e.g., help desk call notes) into a rigid hierarchy. Tags are extensible (i.e., you can add new ones any time). And they allow you to tag things with “apples” and “oranges” and “problems”. Or, in the case of a help desk call, e.g., “XP”, “Junichi’s clients”, “VIP”, “strange flashing screen bug”, “Very important”, “Possibly related to Known Bug 716″ etc. etc. See another cool Mac software that exploits tags very well: Leap.
- Smart folders a la iTunes (aka saved searches with the results always available, no need to hit the “Search” button).
- SLA (service level agreement) monitoring dashboard and reports.
- “Cases” and macros which allow you to automatically fill out fields for oft-repeating sets of data entries.
- Can easily build up a comprehensive self-service “solutions database” out of previous resolved Help Desk tickets.
- Community forum/group blog enabled, in a sensible way that ties into the overall workflow of servicing individual ticketed problems.
Originally I was thinking Zendesk would be appropriate only for SMEs. But the more I mull it over, the more I realize this may be an excellent and low-cost solution–up in days–for large enterprises also. For example, Zendesk allows you to ITIL Incident Management and it can be made to conform to your company’s IT departments workflow and business rules.
Pricing is from free (for one help desk agent), to US$49/month for two agents, up to US$349/month for 25 agents.
Stay tuned for more on Zendesk…
