Knowledge Management Strategies for Zendesk Company

Knowledge Management 1
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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Knowledge Management 2
Introduction and background to the organization
Zendesk is a software company for customers service headquartered in San Francisco,
California. The founders of the software company are; Morten Primdahl, Mikkel Svane, and
Alexander Aghassipour. It was founded in Denmark in the year 2007. It started off as a single
product or customer service but later transformed to cover a unified suite of products for the
improvement of customer relationships. The company offers services through the following
methods; Message, support, connect, guide, help center, explore, talk and explore. With its
availability for tablet and mobile, the platform enables its integration with web apps, tools of
customer relationship management and content management systems. Currently, the company
has a total of 125,000 accounts for paid customers with more than 2000 global employees.
Zendesk has also widened its business scope operating in about 160 territories and customer
countries. It also boasts of 38,000 global volunteer hours since the year 2011.
Knowledge management strategy refers to the plan of action that would provide a clear
outline of how an organization or company will manage its knowledge, information or data for
purposes of improving productivity (Omotayo 2015). There are common strategies that
companies employ in their practice of knowledge management. The common KM strategies
employed include; Increasing the understanding and awareness of knowledge management, the
identification of potential benefits in building a use case for an organization, resources attraction
for implementation, communication of best practices and the provision of a communication plan
about the current position of an organization, where it is projected to be, how knowledge
management will help to take the organization to the projected position and how that will be
measured. This paper will work on the knowledge management strategies that have been
employed for the Zendesk Company.

Knowledge Management 3
Overview of approach and methods used in developing the KM strategy
Zendesk utilizes useful tools. Since the company specializes in customer service, it
provides takes seriously the strategies for knowledge management. Zendesk places a big
emphasis on helping customers to embrace their self-services abilities. In particular, Zendesk
appreciates user experience and design in serving customer knowledge (Svetsky et al. 2018). The
manner of interaction between customers of Zendesk and its brand resources provides the kind of
impression that is present in the services the company serves its customers and its impression.
The tools that Zendesk used for knowledge management are;
- Canva
This tool helps in making accessibility of the basics of getting started easy or in making
the things that do not work, to start working. They also allow the suggestion of features by
customers. Canva provides a voice for customers and in that case, it opens up a valuable
opportunity for Zendesk to improve its business processes and learn from customers.
- Instacart
This tool hosts clean graphics and the prominent search bar on common customer question.
- Evernote
Evernote is another simple tool for knowledge management which creates simplicity in
searching a specific thing instead of combing through endless articles. It has clean categories of
content, crisp organization of knowledge and clean content categories creating an easy process
for a sufficient number of customers to get answers.
The examples of tools for knowledge management above are worthwhile because when
customers can self-serve, customers reap a bigger reward. A report by Gartner shows that
organizations which have proper knowledge management have the ability to reduce the cost of

Knowledge Management 4
overall support by a whopping 25 percent. It is worthwhile to report that 94 percent of the users
of Zendesk guide helps to reduce the cost of support by 50 percent or more.
Zendesk utilizes an efficient approach in its knowledge management strategy. Some of the
approaches utilized by Zendesk include;
- Mapping out areas of knowledge
The process begins by considering the key functional competencies of the best customer
service agent or any other frontline employees. The best inspiration source is the most common
types of tickets that are solved. The company identifies the fact that as the competencies of the
team are grouped, most of them fall under the following broad areas; soft skills, product or
services, company background, and process. Zendesk uses the initial areas of knowledge in the
determination of resources, detailed courses and lessons for its team (Sartori 2019).
- Speed optimization over fidelity
Because of the ever dynamic world, Zendesk appreciates the need for the optimization of
knowledge management strategy for purposes of favoring speed as opposed to fidelity. Fidelity
refers to the high-quality content which is difficult to maintain and extremely expensive to
create. Although the content may be expensive to create, it is inevitable to prevent it from being
outdated (Imran et al., 2016). Therefore, Zendesk prioritizes speed over fidelity because it pays
remarkable dividends and saves a lot of time. It will not be sustainable for Zendesk to invest a lot
of resources in its knowledge management tools and infrastructure, which would later be
disposed of. Instead, the development of the best strategy for knowledge management that can be
improved with fewer resources, efforts and time will offer greater benefits for the company.
- Assigning ownership of bite-sized chunks