The Zen Of Help Desk

Mikkel Svane has an ambitious target for Zendesk – to hit annual revenue run rate of $1 billion by 2020. The Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Zendesk is happy to have reached the halfway mark of $500 million earlier this year. But that took Svane a good 10 years to achieve. To catapult his $6.6 billion market cap company to the target, Svane is under way embracing an enterprising move.

- Sandeep Soni

The customer service software company went public in May 2014, raising $100 million. Around the same time, it started seeing growth in larger companies or enterprise businesses that had more than 100 employees. Till then, the scale came from small and mid-size businesses. Also, it expanded beyond working with digital companies. “We have a lot of small business customers even as more than 100,000 brands globally use our product. However, we are also increasingly catering to large enterprise customers that contribute around 40 percent to our revenue. The democratization of the service has been an important part of our story and continues to be so,” says Svane.

DEMOCRATIZED SUPPORT

Its omnichannel offering called the Zendesk Suite launched in May 2014 is a part of that democratization to offer different customer support channels such as email, social network, chat, help center, talk etc., in a unified manner. The need for going omnichannel was validated by the company’s internal findings. They suggested that the companies integrating their support across all channels saw 31 percent lower first-resolution times and customers had 39 percent lower wait times. “We are switching to a more engaging approach in terms of the omnichannel experience as we tap traditional enterprise businesses. The market has been huge in terms of e-commerce and digital companies where we are already strong,” maintains Malcolm Koh, Customer Experience Strategist, Asia-Pacific, Zendesk.