Company: Zendesk, San Francisco, CA
Entry Submitted By: SutherlandGold
Company Description: Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 40,000 customer accounts, Zendesk is used by organizations in 140 countries to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.
Nomination Category: Web Site Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Computer Software

Nomination Title: Zendesk's Blog

1. How often is this web site updated?

The Zendesk blog is updated multiple times per day. More than 40 employees across different Zendesk business units contribute to the blog to tell the story of customer service.

2. Briefly describe this site's objectives and how it has met those objectives (up to 125 words):

Zendesk’s mission is to help organizations deliver better service and get closer to their customers with help from the Zendesk customer service platform. As part of this mission, Zendesk publishes content ranging from blog posts to webinars to detailed articles—all with the ultimate goal of helping companies and professionals pick up information, tips, and best practices to help their organizations become more successful. The Zendesk blog explores customer service and related topics of interest to multiple stakeholders from IT decision makers to call center agents. The blog aims to capture the news, trends, stories, tips and content that are relevant to the customer service industry. Zendesk blog traffic has increased by 50 percent in year over year comparisons with 40% of web traffic coming organically.

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Over 40 Zendesk employees contribute to the blog - each is credited in the byline for each individual entry. Examples of the various types of content below are included in the links/attachment section. The blog regularly features content such as:

Product tips. A “tip of the week” highlights Zendesk product-specific tips for customers and people evaluating Zendesk. The tips come from Zendesk’s own customer service representatives or our customer community, and they link over to more specific details or how-to instructions in our forums or community.

Original research. The blog frequently highlights findings from original research, including the quarterly Zendesk Benchmark (based on actual customer service and support interactions from more than 16,000 companies) and Zendesk-commissioned, third-party surveys such as the international omnichannel service survey and report.

Infographics. Original graphics featuring our research or other compelling data of interest to our audience or customer service professionals, such as the global findings of our omnichannel survey (“Bridging the Gap”) and our exploration of how our morning routines are getting a tech boost (“Top o’ the Mobile to You”).

 Best practices. The blog regularly includes content from experts within Zendesk and from our broader community of customers and partners. We also feature content from non-affiliated experts in the customer service community such as customer service authors, speakers, consultants, and practitioners. In addition, the blog includes information from our vast library of customer service resources, including ebooks, webinars, and white papers.

Original series. The blog team strives to create original and unique serial content—for either entertainment or education (or both!). Examples include our Dodrill’s Dojo series of customer service best practices and our Mysterious Case of Ticket X series (“Poseidon’s revenge,” “When customers go werewolf on you,” “Curse of the mummy ticket,” “Permanent daylight: the cure for vampire tickets,” “Taking on the dreaded hydra,” and “Zombie tickets”).

Topical content. Although we shy away from “bandwagon” posts and newsjacking, we do seek to use news and events as opportunities to learn or entertain, such as our Academy Awards post on the funniest customer service scenes, our New Year’s resolutions series (which tied into a resolutions social media campaign), our best books of 2013 post and our “ripped from the headlines” post on top customer service stories of 2013.