Originally Posted by Adam Bird

There needed to be a better way for agents in Zendesk to track the tasks that had been assigned them. Using the Cronofy calendar API we created an app that keeps those assignments synchronized with the agent’s calendar.

This post shares our learnings from interacting with the Zendesk API, hopefully to help you with your own Zendesk project.

The Ruby source code for our integration is also available.

When a Ticket is a Task

Tickets are the core entity in the Zendesk domain. Tasks are just Tickets of type : ‘task’. This gives them an additional attribute due_at.

We also need to track the status of the ticket to know when it’s …

Dealing with churn, is one of the most important elements of building a subscription business.  While some churn is inevitable over time, too much churn indicates a more fundamental problem: customers aren't finding value in your product.  

I wrote an article over at GigaOm on this subject including some examples about how to reduce churn from my experience at MySQL and Zendesk.

Having churn is like rowing a leaky boat. After a while, you spend more time bailing water than moving forward. By contrast, organizations that focus on reducing churn will find that their revenue grows every quarter.

To accurately measure what’s going on, you should begin by breaking out churn (customer cancellation) from …

I'm about to take a week off from my new gig as COO at Zendesk and it got me reflecting on the company and my decision to join.  I stayed with MySQL through the Sun acquisition and left when Oracle acquired Sun.  Although I have a lot of respect for Oracle, it seemed to me the only interesting jobs would be those that report directly to Larry Ellison.  So I took some time off to travel, worked as an EIR at Scale Ventures for a few months and began thinking about what I wanted to do next.

I turned down offers from companies and investors to come in and "repeat the MySQL playbook" in Big Data or NoSQL or apps or whatever.  I think Open Source can be a fantastic …