UPDATED 16:07 EDT / AUGUST 02 2011

SaaS Gains Enterprise Help Desk with Zendesk Update

Zendesk today announced that its popular help desk offering, which is used by Sony and Twitter among others, will become more worthwhile for large organizations with an enterprise plan scaled up for the company’s heavy-weight customers. The price tag on it is 99$ per customer support agent per month, and it comes with several major improvements to justify that rate.

First and foremost, Zendesk now offers unlimited internal usage:

“Zendesk is making it possible for all employees to use Zendesk without having to purchase additional seats. This is a great move, and something Zendesk should consider offering in non-enterprise versions as well. This feature also fits well with the new customer service API Zendesk announced earlier this summer.”

In addition to this upgrade, Zendesk added several new features. These include multi-brand help desks and ‘custom agent roles’, which means customers will be able to assign different levels of permissions to agents. Admins can also restrict access to Zendesk based on IP range, which along with the previous feature shows Zendesk’s focus on trying and improve the security aspect of its offering. On top of these, the company also added propriety support and business rule analytics.

Zendesk is venturing into the analytics market in more than one way.  The company participated in Totango’s $3.8 million first round of funding. Totango is a startup that provides a real-time customer analytics SaaS offering, though it is currently only limited to sales rather than the entire lifecycle.

Zendesk is looking to boost its customer base by adding new features, such as analytics, and that seems to be paying off. The firm released a case study a while ago that details the launch of the Scrub Couture help desk.  The SaaS market is a rapidly growing one, as more companies seek out cost-effective ways to manage their team, file-sharing and other aspects of working in today’s digital age.

We’re going to continue to see a lot of development in this space, with competition rising from several directions, as more industries find particular niche points in the SaaS market.  This spans storage, file-syncing, cloud access and more.  Those best positioned across these spaces, with high levels of integration and a close eye on security, will succeed moving forward.


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