• Zendesk Brings Customer Support To 20K Businesses, Gets Localized In 11 Languages

    Anthony Ha

    Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and other startups. Previously, he worked as a staff tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... → Learn More

    Monday, June 25th, 2012
    zendesk logo

    Online customer service company Zendesk is announcing a new feature that could help its customers achieve their global ambitions.

    Specifically, Zendesk is announcing 11 fully localized versions of its product, in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. To be clear, Zendesk customers could already deliver support in 40 languages — but the interface for administrators and support agents were English-only. Now, if your company has offices in multiple countries, each office can manage their customer service in the language of their choice.

    COO Zack Urlocker says the localized version of Zendesk makes it easier to deliver global support in other ways. For one thing, it can automatically detect the language of a customer support request and route the request to the right agent. It can also create automatic responses that take messages templates and dynamically insert the right word in the right language, based on the message. (Salesforce.com is also trying to add localized workflows and content to its customer service platform Desk.com.)

    “For companies that want to be global, we’re making it easy for them to deliver that service in a global fashion,” Urlocker says.

    Through its business customers, Zendesk says it delivers customer support to 70 million consumers in 140 countries. Among other things, that allows it to collect some interesting country-specific data, namely its Customer Satisfaction Index. That index ranges from 55 percent in Brazil to 84 percent in the United States to 89 percent in Japan. It sounds like Zendesk will be keeping an eye on the scores to see if the localized product can bring them up.

    The company is also announcing that it now has 20,000 customers. To illustrate how that growth is accelerating, Zendesk says it took 2.6 years to get its first 5,000 customers, then 0.9 years for the next 5,000, then 0.8, and the most recent bunch only took six months. Those customers include Box, Tumblr, the just-acquired Yammer.

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    Company: Zendesk
    Website: zendesk.com
    Launch Date: October 5, 2007
    Funding: $85.5M

    Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk - customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk SaaS to a company’s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. This is unusual, because most SaaS helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on the backend helpdesk and treat the Web as...

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