Zendesk surpasses USD 500M annual revenue run rate

Cloud-based customer service software company, Zendesk, on Wednesday announced that it surpassed a USD 500 million annual revenue run rate, making it the fastest growing dedicated customer service and engagement platform.

Since Zendesk went public in 2014 with an annual revenue run rate of USD 100 million, the company has seen an increasing number of enterprise companies select Zendesk's software to build better customer experiences.

In just the last four years, annual revenue run rate has grown to USD 500 million, with nearly 40 percent of Zendesk revenue now coming from these larger customers.

The company also launched Guide Enterprise, a new enterprise product with Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered self-service tailored to larger organisations.

Guide Enterprise is Zendesk's third product launch in the past year designed specifically for larger companies, following Chat Enterprise and Talk Enterprise launches.

Guide uses Artificial Intelligence to help larger organisations identify knowledge gaps in customer service content, while also offering easy collaboration capabilities among teams.

With Guide, customers can use forums, community articles, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to find answers instantly, instead of waiting for a customer service representative.

"Hitting the halfway mark on our path to USD 1B by 2020 is an important milestone. It validates how we are helping enterprise companies usher in a new era of trust with their customers through intelligent and powerful software," said Mikkel Svane, CEO, founder, Zendesk.

"As customers demand a new and more direct relationship with businesses, we are investing in intuitive, AI-driven products to empower fast growing, complex organizations to meet these demands," Svane added.

Further, Content Cues, the newest feature in the enterprise version of Guide, uses machine learning to help content managers identify gaps and understand how to drive higher levels of self-service.

This information gives content teams the context they need to focus on what is most relevant and give their customers the right information.

Zendesk is the only full customer service solution to offer this feature.

Guide Enterprise also includes Team Publishing, which helps agents collaborate and manage content, while also creating more integrated, efficient help centers across multiple brands.

"We love Team Publishing. The ability to draft and save versions of an article without publishing them live is a game-changer for us," said Jessie Carroll, technical content manager at Squarespace.

"This amazing feature enables us to conduct reviews more effectively and update our Guide articles in advance of a new feature launch, so we can publish them and support our customers the second changes occur," Carroll added.

Veeva Systems, a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry with an USD 11B market capitalisation, also had early access to Team Publishing.

"The Team Publishing workflow allowed us to streamline our knowledge creation process by making it much easier for agents to create articles and have them reviewed," said Mary Paez, knowledge manager at Veeva.

"This means that articles which once took a week to publish are now live in one-two days. One of the features our team loves is the ability to assign an article to someone for review, which sends an automatic email notification so they know there's something waiting for them without having to monitor the queue," Paez added.

Zendesk customers with early access saw a 17 percent increase in the number of team members contributing to content, allowing customer service representatives to spend more time on complex inquiries and building better relationships with their customers.