Plenty of news coming out of Le Web London this morning. Aside from Box announcing a new London office to scale it’s 15% annual growth in Europe, today we also have news that cloud-based CRM platform Zendesk has landed a UK Government contract for its recently launched new GOV.UK portal for government services.
The usual Zendesk ticketing system will be used to alert the GOV.UK team to inbound customer enquiries allowing them to prioritise queries, and this also incorporates social media customer service. Zendesk has been ramping up the social side with Facebook integration late last year and a Twilio-powered VoIP system.
It’s a feather in the cap for Zendesk which recently hit 5,000 European customers a year after opening its European headquarters.
GOV.UK has been making what you might call some very Web 3.0 plays since its launch. Mike Bracken, executive director, Government Digital Service said: “By empowering our customer team to identify and resolve service issues using a single platform, we’re putting the emphasis on the customer experience, regardless of the communication channel used.” He says they chose Zendesk as it wasn’t a a traditional corporate IT ticketing system.
The news will be a blow tho the usual ticketing systems touted by the likes of EDS and others, which in recent years have been tainted by over-blown IT costs in government departments.