One-To-One and One-To-Many, Simultaneously

I’ve written a few times in the past about Zendesk a ~~Danish~~ Boston-based company that provides a nice friendly help-desk tool that is a perfect way for companies to engage customers in deep one-to-one support conversations – the sort of conversations that wouldn’t happen on a customer facing forum or blog.

Zendesk have gained quite a following – partly because of their somewhat off-the-wall corporate persona (have a look out for their meet-ups, their t-shirts and their infamous Buddha machines) but also through some of the high profile business whose helpdesks they’re powering – companies like Twitter, IDEO and Viddler.

One-to-one is great but it misses an entire category of communications, that is the one-to-many (or many-to-many) conversations that occur on more externally-centric locations.

And this is where Get Satisfaction comes in. Get Satisfaction is the home of crowdsourced public support, the sort of place the lightens the load on internal help-desks by letting the community answer the majority of questions that crop up.. but what happens when the community hasn’t got an answer, or the conversation is more appropriately handled on a private channel?

Well Zendeska and Get Satisfaction have just announced an integration that will allow customers to unite these two distinct types of customer support offerings. One of the beta testers for the integration is Widgetbox who said of the combined offering;

Before the integration, Widgetbox used both Zendesk and Get Satisfaction to communicate with our customers, but we were unable to unite those communications internally to improve overall support, now the information contained in the email conversations we have through Zendesk and the forum conversations enabled by Get Satisfaction are easily shared with one another. Not only are our support services improved, but overall communications with customers is enhanced through the additional insights we collect through this integration.

Users can simply create a Zendesk ticket from within a Get Satisfaction topic;

Or vice versa;

In my simple way of trying to articulate offerings – I liken this combined offering to a lightweight take on what Radian6 offers – without some of the aggregation features (and suitable for smaller, less well-resourced companies). CEO of Get Satisfaction, Wendy Lea, is excited about the possibilities (well she would be, wouldn’t she?) saying that;

Combining Get Satisfaction’s crowdsourced, public support system with Zendesk’s one-to-one, ticketing-based system was a natural fit for the two companies. There are a host of support issues that can’t be shared with everyone on the Internet someone’s private billing information, for example – which is where our partnership with Zendesk fits in remarkably well. This allows us to provide our customers with an end-to-end social CRM system that not only works well, but looks great, too.

It’s another example of combining two lightweight web applications into a powerful tool that provides high level functionality, with a low price tag. My Father used to have the saying “champagne taste with a beer budget”, well integrations like this provide something of an answer to that old metaphor.