Company success story: Zendesk

Products: Zendesk is a customer service software company with a suite of products focused on improving customer relationships including integrated customer support, call center software, live chat and messaging, analytics and reporting and more.

Location: Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with an office in Madison, WI

Employees: 2,000+ employees worldwide

Leadership: Mikkel Svane, one of the founders of the company, serves as the chairman and CEO.

Market: Zendesk is a software development company that provides “software as a service” products that are intended to help organizations and their customers build better relationships. The company’s products empower organizations to improve their customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk’s growing family of products work together to improve the customer experience and can be embedded and extended through an open development platform. With more than 20 offices around the world, Zendesk has 125,00 paid customer accounts across 160 countries and territories.

Business success: Zendesk is expanding its operations at its Madison office and establishing the location as a Midwest regional hub for the company. Since first establishing a presence in Madison with five people in 2013, the office has expanded to nearly 300 employees with capacity to grow to more than 400 as the company continues to hire and invest in the city and the region. The Zendesk Madison office is home to the global customer advocacy as well as engineering, sales, customer success, corporate social responsibility, and business and technology operations teams. Many of Zendesk’s regional customers, including Propeller Health and AkitaBox, contribute to the company’s global success and growth. Zendesk was recently recognized by Madison magazine as one of the Best Places to Work and the office has close ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including a semi-annual class of interns and many Badger alumni.

Wisconsin business environment benefits:

As an incentive for Zendesk’s planned job creation, WEDC is providing the company with $800,000 in performance-based tax credits, contingent on actual job creation. In addition to these incentives, Zendesk was drawn to Madison’s up and coming tech scene, as well as Wisconsin’s strong business climate and dedicated workforce.

“Since our earliest days in Madison, the city has felt like a second home for Zendesk,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk CEO and founder. “It offers a vibrant tech and business community, an abundance of talent, and a culture that supports our growth in the region and globally.”