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"Editor's Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in \"The Startup Review\" series, please see the details here.\nSTARTUP DETAILS:\nCompany Name:  ZenDesk\n20 word description:  We have 50 different channels for reporting issues, feature requests and for asking questions. We must consolidate all of this. Right now. Come Zendesk.\nCEO's 100 word description: Any company, which serves more than a handful of customers, needs a help desk in order to handle customer queries and support requests. Old school help desk solutions are expensive, painfully difficult to set up and hard to use. Enter Help Desk 2.0. \nZendesk is a hosted help desk solution which can be set up by anyone overnight. Zendesk combines a professional-grade feature set with a beautifully simple Ajax-based user interface. Zendesk offers monthly plans from US$19 to US$349, and a free plan for the one-man shop. Since its launch Zendesk has attracted about 2,000 customer signups.\nMashable's Take:  ZenDesk is a help desk management tool, with a consumer-facing front end for users and an administrative back end that allows you to manage support-related projects.  There are a number of similar tools out there, but ZenDesk hopes to stand apart from the crowd with its rather fluid management system, which enables you to organize projects according to your needs and preferences, avoiding the rigid categorization found with most help desk services.\nThe idea with such fluid organization is that navigating the actual help desk application will be faster and more intuitive, making projects easier to search, run and track.  This is achieved with optimized use of tagging and search capabilities, so stringent categorization isn't needed.  That's not to say that categorization is completely absent, but preloaded tag dictionaries and searchability across more fields makes ZenDesk easier to use for a broader range of people. \n\n\n\n\n \n\nWith a consumer-facing product, ZenDesk is also likened a bit to a Salesforce-like system, though in reality such direct comparisons aren't the case.  I did wonder if there would be any integration of ZenDesk with CRM systems like Salesforce, as the two systems go hand-in-hand more than they compete.  \nWhile this doesn't explicitly seem to be part of the picture, ZenDesk does offer an API as part of its service, so any integration with your business' existing systems could be developed.  Meanwhile, task-management tools like Huddle have begun to integrate help-desk features as well. A service such as ZenDesk also seems primed for integration with some of the business-oriented VoIP services that are picking up traction, including Ribbit and Jajah.\n\n\nSponsored by Sun Startup Essentials\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/06/09/zendesk/>