2-plus years ago, when Coupa’s first customers came on board, we needed some way to communicate with them on issues and questions.  I had experience how Oracle did it and wasn’t about to go down that route.  Customers called in or logged issues directly into this homebuilt customer help desk system called Metalink.  Then Support spent days with a ticket trying to gather info and trying to reproduce.  If it was an actual code problem, maybe it got to Development a week later in another application called BugDB.  Support worked in Metalink, developers worked in BugDB and there was plenty hidden between the 2.  But that’s the support you get when paying 22% annually of your license fees.

At Coupa, we decided to go with a single system for help desk and issue/bug tracking.  Sometimes we don’t get it right the first time.  Our first solution was a SaaS system, but it lacked one of the main principles that Coupa was founded on:  simplicity.  Customers didn’t hate the system, but it wasn’t exactly user-friendly. Our development team detested it.  It slowed us down and that just couldn’t happen.  It was un-agile.

Graham, our development manager said (I’ll paraphrase), “It just blows….it’s fundamentally unintuitive.”

So one of our guys scanned the world via Google one night and stumbled upon a tiny company from Copenhagen named Zendesk.  They used Rails like us.  They were agile like us. They had free trials like us.  They were affordable like us.  In about 16 hours, our decision was made when our VP of Service Delivery sent an email:

From Ravi’s email…”this product is almost as cool as our app – freakin amazing”

We jettisoned that old system and turned on Zendesk immediately.  A couple months later, Zendesk named Coupa first in their list of customers in their seed investment press release.   It was great to see another Rails company succeeding.

Fast-forward to the present and Zendesk has grown significantly.  Now, headquartered in San Francisco, they have other great customers like Twitter, MSNBC, Scrib’d, IDEO and plenty others.   Most importantly, their solution is part of the collaboration that makes our customers successful and our development team agile.  The team doesn’t waste time on perfect classification of a ticket.  Instead, we get to work on it.  Besides that, it’s got simple and easy reporting, nice ways to communicate new features, and a collaborative forum for product enhancement ideas.  Our product roadmap gets influenced by the suggestions and the dialogue on our Zendesk site.  And we constantly track the percentage of suggestions that we implement and the pace that they’re done.

Without agile development, the cloud, Rails, and open source, I’m pretty sure that companies like Coupa and Zendesk wouldn’t have a fighting chance.  But with them, we’re changing the face of applications for businesses.