If you visit the About the Company link on ZenDesk, the dialogue starts out with a quote from Thoreau. “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify! Simplify!” Sheesh, I couldn’t agree more. On that note, in my bid to continue to document the tools and API’s being used to develop Spudaroo.com (by the way, 1.0 goes live next week.. yeehaw!)…

Who: ZenDesk
What: On-demand customer support tool
Role within Spudaroo: Customer support and system alert management

I’ve played with a few support tools in my time. SalesForce, SugarCRM and Kayako amongst others. Sitting here and recalling the process for setting up email relay in any one of these solutions makes baby Jesus cry so I’m setting that memory aside.

When I signed up to ZenDesk, it was still a Freemium model so I grabbed the free account to start playing. I was informed shortly after that my free account would now cost $9 a month. Bummer. But still worth it while I tinkered away during development. Setting up Spudaroo was quick and easy and I burned all sorts of time playing with interesting drop box designs and triggers. Let me layout exactly what ZenDesk fulfills for Spudaroo and that should simplify! simplify! a potentially complicated post.

support(at)spudaroo.com

The barebones of the relationship between the two websites. If you email this address, this second, a ticket will be created and the agents belonging to Spudaroo are notified that you need something. I, being the agent can respond to you via email or head for spudaroo.zendesk.com and respond to the ticket from there. I can also prioritize it, assign it to someone else or close it. Lots of fun stuff that will leave you feeling warm, fuzzy and ‘heard’ at Spudaroo.com

Drop box support

There are various ways to contact us on the website not counting the feedback tab. For the record, ZenDesk also provide a Feedback tab and you can have all your feedback go through ZenDesk. But I felt that feedback and support are two different things and left that to GetSatisfaction.com. For the record (again), ZenDesk and GetSat have formed a relationship where upon you can seamlessly transfer feedback into ZenDesk from GetSat if the feedback is in need of support. This will cost you $90 a month at GetSat which is a little steep for the bootstrapped, startup brigade.

Okay back to the drop box. The drop box in short, pops a form when a link (or tab) is clicked. You can have all sorts of fun pre-populating the form with a topic, tags, reg. user’s email address etc. When the form is submitted, all this info is thrown into the ticket along with any comment made on the form. Tags are brilliant. You can use a tag to create a trigger. Triggers do things like alert people, send out an email with specific content, adjust priority etc. So Spudaroo’s drop box is integrated anywhere you see links such as Report this contest or Contact support.

System alerts

We have built a bunch of alerts into Spudaroo for all sorts of things but mainly to combat naughty people and let us know when a big contest has been posted. Whenever Spudaroo detects some unusual activity or a big, fat contest – an alert is generated in ZenDesk. We did this by opening a ticket in ZenDesk via the API, adding a tag to that ticket, tag triggers an action and in this case, that action is notifying us of whatever the alert is. The reason I did this is because alerts, like support requests require tangible resolution and should be treated and documented the same way.

And there you have it. ZenDesk is the must have for companies. I suspect these guys are signing up clients left and right and Salesforce are wondering how much they’ll cost to acquire. That’s a thought.. I wonder who will acquire them. Intuit maybe after their *cough* foray into customer support.