Zendesk Helps Businesses All Over the World Keep Their Customers Happy

As an IT consultant in Copenhagen, Denmark, Mikkel Svane saw how expensive and inconvenient it was for many businesses to acquire and install on-premise customer support software. He knew a Web-based product would be a better option, so he recruited Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour to help create an online customer service solution. As a result, Zendesk was born in 2007.

After receiving positive feedback from their first few customers, one of which was msnbc.com, Svane left his job to become Zendesk's CEO and first full-time employee. In 2009, the company secured funding from Charles River Ventures and Benchmark Capital and moved to San Francisco. Zendesk also reached the 1,000-customer mark that year.

Currently, Zendesk has 20,000 customers, including Tumblr, Box, Sears, Groupon, and Yammer. The on-demand help desk and customer support portal runs on the latest Web 2.0 technologies such as Ruby on Rails. With a clean, elegant design, Zendesk includes ticket management, analytics, and discussion forums, among other features. It's also accessible through various channels, from email to social networks to Android to iOS, allowing businesses to connect with their customers anytime, anywhere.

Today, Zendesk announced a new feature that will prove to be especially useful to its international clients. The company has put out 11 entirely localized versions of its product, in English, Chinese (simplified and traditional), French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. While businesses using Zendesk were able provide support in 40 languages before, the admin interface was only available in English, until now.

“For companies that want to be global, we're making it easy for them to deliver that service in a global fashion,” said COO Zack Urlocker.

Zendesk's business customers offer support to 70 million consumers in 140 countries. The new localized feature, which can automatically detect the language of requests, lets companies in non-English-speaking countries better serve their customers.