Zendesk

Zendesk, a pioneer in Agentic AI-powered services, supports over 100,000 customers across more than 160 countries. Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite of solutions, including messaging and chat, help center products, workforce engagement tools, and data privacy and protection services. This empowers service teams to ensure customer satisfaction for some of the world's largest businesses.

Companies using Zendesk enable both their customer service teams and their customers to communicate asynchronously. Customer service agents use the composer, a rich text editing component inside the Zendesk product, to enable them to quickly address their customers’ questions and requests.

It takes a host of applications across multiple channels to accomplish Zendesk’s purpose. But with different editing solutions used across their products, the company was challenged with giving the millions of service agents using Zendesk a holistic means of communicating and documenting customer interactions and needs. The lack of standardization resulted in uneven experiences for service agents, and contributed to inconsistencies as these agents composed emails, social messaging responses, recorded notes from conversations, and otherwise interacted with their customers across multiple channels.

Plus, using multiple editors in different products added technical overhead and complexity to product development. This slowed product development and releases and hindered the company’s ability to quickly scale products with new features and functionality.

What Zendesk needed was a single rich text editor component that could be embedded as the composer, the core editing element to their suite of solutions, to offer agents a cohesive and familiar editing experience. The ideal solution would be flexible and offer a full range of features, allowing Zendesk to bring in a single rich text editor to handle its multiple communication use cases.

In their search for the right solution, Zendesk evaluated six different rich text editors. They were looking for a product that, of course, offered standard rich text editing features, like styling text and pasting from different sources. They also needed something that would be robust and flexible.

What Zendesk discovered, however, was that they could get a rich text editor that would meet all of their requirements and solve additional challenges, as well. The company chose CKEditor. Not only did it offer a scalable editor component that was flexible enough to adapt to a myriad of use cases, CKEditor offered other features that allowed Zendesk to advance their products even further.

Like all of the other products evaluated, CKEditor offered standard editing functionality. But beyond the expected, CKEditor provided accessibility features, supported mentions, and prevented comment collisions. Additionally, the company was able to take advantage of the editor for localization to support their customers across the globe working in 30 different languages. The editor’s strong community and extensive documentation gave Zendesk the confidence to choose CKEditor as the component at the core of their composer. “I was able to get a lot of information,” said Rachna Keswani, Group Product Manager, “just by going to the documentation without hunting in different places. That wasn’t necessarily the case when I was looking at other editors.”

With CKEditor, Zendesk was able to standardize the editing experience in their products, regardless of communication medium or channel. They can now offer powerful features with a unified and familiar user experience, and customer service agents have a consistent and familiar set of editing tools. This ensures agents can spend their time helping customers instead of navigating their tools, resulting in better customer service outcomes. Plus, agents can operate in their own language and collaborate on customer cases and records without being concerned about overwriting each other's work.

And since the same editor is used across their products, development time for new features and functionality has dropped, even as the organization continues to grow and scale. Instead of managing multiple different solutions, Zendesk has a single, proven editor component with comprehensive documentation that the development team can rely on.