Founder Stories: Zendesk's Mikkel Svane On Applying Customer ...

Can you measure corporate performance based on customer happiness? According to my Founder Stories guest this week, Zendesk?s Mikkel Svane, happiness is actually an important metric in the business of customer service.

What has happened over the last five or six years is that the notion of customer service has changed from just being this call center to something where you can create real meaningful long-term relationships with your customers and think about it as a revenue center.?

Zendesk produces a customer service platform that is used by more than 30,000 businesses worldwide. Started five years ago in Denmark, the once ?virtual bootstrap? startup now has 400 employees and is experiencing at least 100 percent growth year over year. In our conversation, Mikkel and I discuss why he decided to move Zendesk to the U.S., how to create corporate culture when a third of the company works locally, and why Zendesk is opening an office in Madison, Wis.

We try to keep this culture of exchanging a lot and traveling a lot and really getting to know each other as people. I think getting the individual people to meet each other is kind of the platform for building good structures that can scale globally.?

Editor?s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter?s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.

Mikkel Svane is the CEO and founder of Zendesk. He started the company with Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour to make great customer service available to everyone and create software that people love to use. Today, he leads Zendesk?s global operations and business strategy with those same goals in mind. A Dane-turned-San Franciscan, Mikkel in 2009 moved the company from Copenhagen to San Francisco. He keeps Zendesk?s Danish design roots at the center of the product while growing the...

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Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk - customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk SaaS to a company?s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. This is unusual, because most SaaS helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on the backend helpdesk and treat the Web as...

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Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. He focuses on investments in the firm?s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and ?big data.? He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment. An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and...

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/founder-stories-zendesks-mikkel-svane/

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