Zendesk - when the trial is over

As a freelance IT consultant for Spark Consulting I have spent a lot of time trying to find my workflow app in the cloud space to allow me a simple process for creating tasks from emails, allowing clients to create task requests without emailing me directly and to provide a collaborative area for me to communicate with clients in a project space, also outside of my inbox.

Additionally I needed a discussion board and somewhere to post tutorials and help files specific to a client and their project. Lastly I need to be able to invoice them.

It sounds a simple request and believe me the hardest part is actually finding the right app amongst the myriad of excellent cloud apps that can fill the above requirements. My challenge however was I needed something that fitted into my existing cloud workstyle as I am fairly well entrenched.

Enter Zendesk, love your helpdesk they say and after trialling it over the last month I could not agree more. But while a help desk it may be, it's highly customisable data fields, excellent api, and while we're bandying round the big words, the super dooper view options allow it to be what is, limited only by imagination.

I have setup my Zendesk as projects and tasks for clients with a primary task view sorted by custom project fields and category headings then the due dates. The second view is simply a due date view grouped by task type.

Being that it is built on a helpdesk framework the levels of automation from using pre built and custom triggers and targets allow me to focus on doing the task and updating it's status. With a status update the triggers kick in and send off pre formatted emails to those who need updating.

Being able to create custom fields is cool but to be able to reference them as placeholders in automated emails makes them very powerful by delivering status updates that don't have a helpdesk feel to them.

My final goodness in this has been integrating it with toodledo which I use for non project specific tasks. Call this person, invoice this client etc...

Using targets in Zendesk I was able to utilize the triggers from a status update of "solved" and have it send an email to my toodledo Dropbox, assign a context of Invoicng, put it in the weekly tasks folder and pull data from the ticket which ends up reading as a task something like "Invoice xyz company 3.75 hours for creating new widget"

So now I simply check my tasks in zendesk, do them, update them as solved, and I'm done. When it comes time to check my weekly tasks on Friday morning there s a list of invoice details to create. My accounts manager sends a pre formatted email off to toodledo requesting all tasks with context of invoicing to get the list in her inbox and then proceeds to invoice our clients through xero. Next step will be building in a Xero widget for zendesk but that's a little out of my league.

So I guess I love my helpdesk too...
Source: http://www.teamspark.co.nz/zendesk-when-the-trial-is-over/