Zendesk Brings Customer Support To 20K Businesses, Gets Localized In 11 Languages

Online customer service company Zendesk is announcing a new feature that could help its customers achieve their global ambitions.

Specifically, Zendesk is announcing 11 fully localized versions of its product, in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. To be clear, Zendesk customers could already deliver support in 40 languages — but the interface for administrators and support agents were English-only. Now, if your company has offices in multiple countries, each office can manage their customer service in the language of their choice.

COO Zack Urlocker says the localized version of Zendesk makes it easier to deliver global support in other ways. For one thing, it can automatically detect the language of a customer support request and route the request to the right agent. It can also create automatic responses that take messages templates and dynamically insert the right word in the right language, based on the message. (Salesforce.com is also trying to add localized workflows and content to its customer service platform Desk.com.)

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

Through its business customers, Zendesk says it deliver customer support to 70 million consumers in 140 million companies. Among other things, that allows it to collect some interesting country-specific data, namely its Customer Satisfaction Index. That index ranges from 55 percent in Brazil to 84 percent in the United States to 89 percent in Japan. It sounds like Zendesk will be keeping an eye on the scores to see if the localized product can bring them up.

The company is also announcing that it now has 20,000 customers. To illustrate how that growth is accelerating, Zendesk says it took 2.6 years to get its first 5,000 customers, then 0.9 years for the next 5,000, then 0.8, and the most recent bunch only took six months. Those customers include Box, Tumblr, the just-acquired Yammer.