Today, Zendesk hosted its second annual Startup CX Awards, highlighting the best and brightest startups building innovative customer experiences using Zendesk. Keynote speaker Omar Johnson, former CMO of Beats by Dre and VP of Marketing at Apple, spoke about his career journey, emphasizing the important roles of empathy and diversity in business, and answered questions from our startups community.

A panel of judges, which included last year’s winners and CX experts from companies built on Zendesk like Ada and Tymeshift, carefully reviewed all nominations and eventually selected a winner from four different categories. The winner of the fifth category, Community Choice, was selected during the live event with attendees voting for their favorite use case of Zendesk.

Here are this year’s highly deserving winners:
Apps & Integrations – successfully using apps and integrations from the Zendesk Marketplace to streamline operations
Winner: Studs, an ear-piercing and earring jewelry brand that has scaled from 2 to 10 brick & mortar locations (with more coming soon!). They also doubled their e-commerce business, while shortening resolution times without growing their team.

Seamless CX – ensuring a seamless experience for customers who never have to repeat themselves, no matter what channel they use to reach out
Winner: European B2B digital wholesale marketplace Orderchamp. They have connected over 90,000 independent retailers and 5,000 brands across Europe, and have achieved a 96% CSAT score on Zendesk live chat. Their approach: H2H interaction rather than simply B2C or B2B.

Innovation – the name says it all: building innovative experiences
Winner: Firstbase helps incorporate startups globally and automates all of the mundane tasks every founder faces when launching a business. Since 70% of their tickets ask for IRS status updates, they developed an automated system with Zendesk to proactively keep their customers in the loop on a weekly basis, which provides an account manager-like experience.

Data & Insights – leveraging Zendesk data to drive better business decisions
Winner: Nutrisense’s technology monitors blood glucose levels and helps people achieve their health goals via work with dietitians. They leverage custom queries within Zendesk to present feedback to their engineering & product teams

Community Choice
Winner: Lang.ai uses artificial intelligence to tag customer conversations in real-time and unlock the potential of a CX team. They have used Zendesk to scale more efficiently by leveraging the data provided by the Zendesk platform.

Congratulations everyone!