Zendesk turns tweets into customer support "twickets"

Help-desk software maker Zendesk has launched a way for businesses to feed tweets through their customer support system. Twitter has long been used to manage customer complaints by small businesses and tech startups, which make up a big part of Zendesk’s clientele.

The integration is pretty simple. It doesn’t feed in all tweets that mention a company’s name. Instead, it lets employees watching the Twitter stream select certain tweets to forward on to customer service reps.

After that, the tweets turn into regular inquiries in Zendesk’s system, which tracks e-mail and messages from customers and forwards them to the right people in a company. This lets a company’s employees continue the conversation outside of the public sphere and ask more detailed questions. You can follow an entire Twitter conversation between your reps and a customer. The product also integrates with whatever existing software a company is using to manage its social media presence.

Mikkel Svane, Zendesk’s chief executive, said the company researched the social media dashboard market and decided against building a new Twitter or Facebook client from scratch.

“Other companies are coming up with fantastic Twitter clients,” Svane said. “We should let our customers use whatever they want.” Zendesk is using Twitter’s basic application programming interface to build the product, but Svane added that the company is looking at Twitter’s forthcoming annotations feature (which allows you to tag tweets) for future versions.

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