Practical Zendesk Administration, 2nd Edition

Foreword

We built Zendesk back in 2007 because we were frustrated with the quality of the customer service applications that existed at the time. The vast majority of these “solutions” were big, clunky, on-premise enterprise applications, were distributed on CDs, and took forever to deploy. Even proof-of-concept projects often took months to complete. And when all was said and done, no one, especially the customer, was ever really satisfied.

Zendesk was the first truly cloud-based customer service application that you could sign up for, subscribe to, and configure online. Launching the application within an organization took hours instead of months.

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine software being distributed or packaged any other way. We helped revolutionize an entire industry in only five years, yet that handful of years seems like a lifetime ago. The changes in technology have been only part of the story. More important are the cultural shifts that the technology enabled, the changes in the very relationships between companies and their customers. The explosion of online social networks, crowd-sourced review sites, and subscription-based business models creates incredible opportunities (or challenges, depending on your perspective) for those businesses willing to shift their thinking about customer relationships. Our goal at Zendesk was always to help businesses realize those opportunities.

This manual—while it focuses on teaching administrators and agents how to use Zendesk better—can also set the groundwork for building better, simpler, more human customer relationships within your own organization. By learning how best to use Zendesk, you can accomplish larger organizational goals and changes: empowering employees to fully help customers, increasing responsiveness, becoming more transparent, and seeing and relating to your customers more fully.

We applaud any business that sets its sights beyond simple brand loyalty, and instead makes the shift toward customer relationships. It takes a ton of work, but it’s worth it.

We couldn’t ask for better guides into Zendesk than Stafford and Anton. Stafford created the original Zendesk training program and has helped hundreds of businesses use Zendesk to transform their own customer service operations. Anton has run the documentation team at Zendesk for three years, took over customer training in 2013, and knows the product inside and out. Aside from their deep product knowledge, both of them are gifted with the skill of making even the most complicated concepts seem simple, and they remain keenly focused on what is actually important: using Zendesk to accomplish your organization’s goals.

Reading these chapters is like reading the advanced manual we never wrote when we designed the product. Stafford and Anton’s ability to enlighten readers on how to use the product better and the reasons for the design decisions in Zendesk never ceases to impress us.

Passion is what drove Zendesk’s founders to build the product before you today. But it is the success of our customers that built our company. More than 40,000 organizations around the world rely on Zendesk for great customer service and engagement. We believe this book can help all Zendesk admins and agents improve customer service and build better customer relationships for their organizations.

Happy reading! And if you are ever in San Francisco, let us know so we can buy you a drink.

—Mikkel Svane

Founder and CEO of Zendesk