# Zendesk: Revolutionary Ticketing What were the problems Zendesk innovated on; what was it created to address? ## The User Agent problems Indirect benefactor of the operationally focused revolutions to the Support and Business Agent's problems - The user agent's email or phone call seemingly went into a void. - The user agent had zero discoverability (no help centers) and total dependency on the sent email. They had no idea if their issue was received, who was working on it, or when it might be fixed. - Zendesk provided an auto-reply with a ticket number. Simple but revolutionary; it was the first time a user had a _receipt_ for their problem. ## The Support Agent problems Zendesk was built for this agent. Emails were turned into tickets with User History, macros for canned responses, and transforming the inbox into a structured queue. * Support agents were taxed navigating the ever-growing warzone of the inbox. * Multiple support agents would reply to the same email with different answers. * Support agents could not know if others were addressing an outstanding email and emails would sit unanswered for days; the bystander effect. * Support agents had no easy way to see what a customer (or "Dave from Support") said last week. ## The Engineering Agent problems Zendesk protected safeguarded engineer time that was otherwise spent digging through threads to make sense of a case. Support Agent was forced to summarize the issue in a clean ticket before escalating it. This saved engineers from parsing email chaos. - The engineering agent would get a messy, 10-message-long thread headed with "FWD: FWD: URGENT!" and have to excavate the actual problem from it. - The engineering agent is taxed needing to leave their own systems (like Bugzilla) to make sense of bug reports. ## The Business Agent problems Secondary target, the buyer of the platform or license. - Business agents (the manager) had no visibility into many support emails came in, how long they took to answer, or if customers were happy. - There seems to have been no centralized mechanism for managerial oversight before the invention of the ticketing system - Business agents managed by walking around or asking for a manual spreadsheet. - Zendesk's Dashboards and Reports created meaningful trackers, FRT, TTR, CSAT via centralization. - The structure (queues, SLAs, assignments) provided allowed for scaling. - Business agents could not scale a team without descending into anarchy. - The "per-agent" pricing model matched the new ability to manage headcount.