Zendesk Reimagines Customer Self-Service with New Help Center

August 21, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – August 21, 2013 – Zendesk, the leading provider of cloud software for better customer service, today launched Help Center, an all-in-one knowledge base, community and customer portal designed for customers to help themselves. The new Help Center enables any company to create a self-service portal that is beautiful and relevant for their customers and is as simple to create and customize as a blog.

Self-service is more important than ever before as consumers increasingly expect to find their own answers to support questions. Four times as many customers seek answers for themselves through self-service options than submit a request to a company for support. Meanwhile, two out of three consumers say they prefer finding their own answers over interacting with customer service representatives, a separate survey found.

“Consumers want customer service on their own terms, and they expect to find immediate answers online,” said Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s senior vice president of product development. The new Help Center makes self-service a first-class experience, both for companies customizing it for their needs and for their customers seeking relevant content.”

Zendesk has offered self-service options since its founding, and last year launched a mobile-optimized interface for self-service. With Help Center, Zendesk rethought and rebuilt the experience from the ground up to fit the expectations of today’s customers.

For customers, Help Center surfaces more relevant content more quickly so they can get answers in fewer steps. It features a new community section inspired by leading question-and-answer sites, where customers can participate in conversations with one another. Trending questions are highlighted to the entire community, and questions are recommended to customers based on the content they’ve viewed in past.

For companies, the new Help Center focuses on simpler customization and management so they can make it their own. New features include:

• Themes: Zendesk is one of the first to bring the concept of design themes, common on website-creation and blogging platforms, to business applications. By applying a theme, companies now can quickly start their own help centers and make them look beautiful immediately. They can also customize them further without needing to be an expert in HTML.

• Content management: Keeping a help center updated has never been easier. A new administrator toolbar allows for editing and drafting of content directly from a company’s live help center.

• Multilingual content: Across more than 40 supported languages, including major Asian and right-to-left languages, companies can manage multilingual content from one place by linking translated versions of content with the default language.

“”Our donors are our customers, and they turn to our website first when they have a question,”” said Kaitlyn Jankowski, supporter experience manager at charity:water, a non-profit bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations and a test customer for Help Center. “We pride ourselves on delivering excellent customer service, and that requires an online help center as beautiful and easy to use as our website. Zendesk and its new Help Center let us deliver on that promise.”

About Zendesk

Zendesk builds cloud software for better customer service, bringing companies and their customers closer together. With Zendesk, companies engage directly and openly with customers, building more meaningful customer relationships that last a lifetime. More than 30,000 companies, such as Gilt Groupe, Disney and Box, use Zendesk to provide service to more than 200 million people worldwide. Founded in 2007 and based in San Francisco, Zendesk has offices in seven countries and funding from Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, GGV Capital, and Goldman Sachs.