Zendesk Launches Customer Service Network to Enable Seamless Collaboration among Vendors

A leading provider of cloud-based help desk software for fast growing companies, Zendesk has played a key role in creating what the company called “the world's largest customer service network”. Called NetworkedHelpDesk.org the initiative has drawn more than 10,000 companies. Based on an open standard, the network will help the multiple partners and suppliers collaborate on support requests by providing them with a seamless communication via Zendesk’s ticket sharing technology. The system will enable the network members deliver an unprecedented customer experience for their 30 million plus users worldwide.

The NetworkedHelpDesk.org initiative was launched during the opening keynote of the Atlassian Summit in San Francisco. Apart from Zendesk, the other founding members are Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS (News - Alert), Pivotal Tracker, ServiceNow and SugarCRM. In a press release Zendesk said that currently, more than 15 high-growth companies endorse this open standard including Coherence Design, Connect2Field, CustomWare, Freshbooks, GroundWork, PagerDuty, Pervasive, Rypple, Twilio (News - Alert), and Wildbit.

Organizations with multiple partners, suppliers or departments often find it difficult to perform project management, customer relationship management and customer support tasks through disparate systems. The NetworkedHelpDesk.org provides a uniform way to connect these disparate systems for seamless collaboration through an open API, Zendesk explained in a press release.

When a support request is being processed, it runs the risk of getting lost in the midway, because support interactions are generally handled by multiple teams with different tools and processes. It also becomes difficult to track the progress of the support request. In locating the right contact for the other company, much time and resources are also wasted.

The Zendesk Ticket Sharing technology enables a support agent to seamlessly share a customer support request from their help desk with another organization also using Zendesk as their help desk software, such as a partner or supplier. The support interaction through all its stages gets documented to eliminate the risks of losing details. This ensures speedier resolving of the issue. Thus by easing the process of collaboration across companies, the Zendesk Ticket Sharing technology helps deliver better customer service.

"Zendesk Ticket Sharing enables companies of all sizes, from SMBs to large enterprises, to tap into an established customer support ecosystem. As more organizations collaborate within the Zendesk ecosystem, this network becomes more powerful, which translates to a superior customer experience and faster resolution times for everyone,” COO of Zendesk maintained in a statement.

“This gives the engineering team complete visibility into the customer issue, and the engineer, in return, can send a resolution back to the customer support agent through the same ticket, Nothing is lost across systems and the customer receives a complete and timely resolution to the problem,” Zendesk’s Vice President of Engineering Adrian McDermott noted at the launch.

Earlier this month Zendesk announced Zendesk for WordPress. The new integration lets administrators select and easily convert customer comments on blogs into Zendesk help desk tickets.