There is nothing sexy or romantic about help desk software but I’m in love with Zendesk. As the person responsible for support I need to stay on top of what’s going on within our organization and make sure our clients are happy. I also need to be able to disseminate and share information quickly to both our customers and employees. Zendesk helps us do that plus much more.

For years we used an internally developed help system, and while it was good, it didn’t provide the features, flexibility and robustness of Zendesk. Zendesk allows us to tailor our help desk software to meet the needs of our business. Our customers are automatically logged into their private Help and Support portal from our application using Zendesk’s API. This is huge because our customers don’t need to remember one login for our application and another one for Zendesk.

Single Interface

Once in the portal, they can submit a support request, follow recent changes we’ve made to our applications, search the forums for answers to their questions and even vote on features they would like us to develop in the future. What’s nice for administrators, or Agents as Zendesk refers to them, is all of this can be done in one simple, configurable interface.

Easy to Use

While we have only been using Zendesk for a few months, we’re already seeing dividends. Customers are saying our new Help and Support portal is easier to use and empowers them to find their own answers to their questions. One feature that’s especially useful is when customers create a support request and are typing in their question or problem, Zendesk searches in real-time to see if it can find relevant matches. These matches are immediately shown below the subject they are typing and customers often find their answer before they even finish typing in their question.

Built-In Feedback

Another feature which has proven to be immediately useful is Zendesk’s built-in feedback mechanism. This feature allows our customers to rate each and every request with a simple “I’m Satisfied” or “Not Satisfied”. It is amazing the wealth of information and insight you can gain from your customers with this one simple question. Let’s face it, they really are the infantry fighting the battle day in and day out and they know what they need. They also have a unique view of the battleground, so you better listen to their needs, troubles and ideas.

All of this would be for naught if Zendesk didn’t give you the information you need to constantly improve your process. A successful business strives to grow and adapt to the changing needs of its customers, and the key to that is giving the clients a means to let you know what they need. When a customer presents us with an idea for a new feature we immediately add it into a forum so that all our clients can see it and “vote” on it. This helps us to focus our enhancement and development process to those issues most requested by our clients.

As you can see there is a lot to love about Zendesk. It’s proven to be a great help system and I am sure it will help us provide even better service to our customers as we move forward.