Zendesk and the Art of Trademark Trolling | Hacker News Reader

Zendesk and the Art of Trademark Trolling

eff.org

98 pointsbeNjiox30 comments

Wait, this sounds like Zendesk is an independent company. Isn't it a subsidiary of Autodesk? Now I'm confused...

Well played, sir/ma'am. You make an excellent point.

This is a fine reason to use OSTicket or Request Tracker, both of which are free, open source and (with their various dependencies and modules) composed of entirely GPL, BSD and Apache licensed software.

Disregard Zendesk, acquire RT.

RT has been around for 15 years but it's continually developed and kept up to date. It's used by a large percentage of the 50 largest ISPs in the world for their back-end OSS/NOC ticketing.

Wait until they go after everything that's pronounced verbally like Zen. Most people I know if speaking about the Xen hypervisor will say "zen", not pronounce it as if it were a Chinese family name (Chen or how the X in Xiaoming is pronounced).

Quick question, what would be a good alternative to Zendesk? We've initially chosen it because it seemed pretty standard, but it looks designed for much larger companies. We avoid using it (!) because the UI is confusing, and it's very pricey for what it does (especially that some basic features are locked in the higher-priced tiers). This article doesn't help either.

We switched from Zendesk to Helpscout, at that time because their documentation portal feature didn't fit what we wanted (markdown edition and other things I forgot). The migration has been painless (all zendesk issues are imported to helpscout).

Apart from the documentation system, I personally prefer their UI (it feels more "modern"), the fact that a support conversation looks exactly like a very classic email conversation to your customers (no issue number in the email's subject, no specific signature or structure in the content etc), and Helpscout's team have always been helpful and nice so far. The API is pretty complete as well. We're using it only for support conversations nowadays, so I can't comment on the knowledge base features etc.

We're very happy with Helpscout. Like the other poster mentioned, their API is pretty thorough, and the interface does a good job of getting out of your way.

We really like the documentation features as well; again, very thorough.

The one thing we really wish was there is custom field support on customer records, but Helpscout does workaround this by letting you set up a webhook it'll hit to present more information inline.

The team I'm on uses Helpscout. I've used Zendesk in the past, and hated the unnecessary formatting added to every message.

Helpscout is invisible to the customer, but more than adequate for our needs. Our only pain point is it's got bad trello integrations, so we're building our own.

Intercom, hands down. We switched what now seems a long time ago, and the pricing is like 3x of what we paid for Zendesk, but the UX feels so much more natural and UI unobstructive that we gladly pay $600/mo for it. Plus the additional features make it a non brainer (true, it also lacks some that Zendesk has)

We used Intercom for a while and found it didn't fit our use-case; our tickets tend to be longer and more technically in-depth, and the Intercom UI/API didn't perform very well in those constraints.

Additionally, the chat-based interface gave our customers the expectation that they'd always get an immediate response, which just wasn't always possible.

We still have it and use it for some features like usage analytics, but it's not our primary support tool.

consider using Freshdesk. They have a so much and are much better than zendesk and Intercom. If you have a mobile app then use Hotline (https://hotline.io/) they have an integration with freshdesk. This two product go hand in hand and also have a good support team.

about 3 years ago we switched to desk.com and have been very happy with it. there are a few things we would like them to fix/upgrade but mostly it gets the job done and doesn't cost us a lot.

I've been following https://www.groovehq.com/ startup blog for some time and it's quite interesting.

How big is your team?

For smaller teams, I love Front.

In looking for things that will likely work better for larger teams (10-15+) Help Scout and Groove are both pretty appealing.

Desk.com is like Zendesk in that it tries to "do everything."

I haven't evaluated it fully, but a lot of people love Intercom as well if you want to do in-app/on-site support.

Would you please link directly to "Front"? I tried the Google, but apparently "StayInFront", "Soffront", and "Infront" have different legal philosophies with respect to trademark than do the assholes at Zendesk. TIL customer confusion is actually a real thing!

Yep, sorry about that: https://frontapp.com/

Also consider Freshdesk (https://freshdesk.com)

Helpscout has been awesome and is responsive to feature and support requests.

When I was at ZenPayroll we received a notice early on (2013) from ZenDesk about name conflict.

The rebrand which ended up as Gusto was, in part, caused by this.

To be fair to ZenDesk, we had a similar target market and did get questions about whether we were the same company.

To be fair to ZenPayroll, they pivoted mid-YC from a company called Switchboard Labs so didn't put a lot of long-term thought into the name.

Naming things is hard, but at least establish your own name-space.

Well, I thought about using zendesk but now I'm taking my business somewhere else and I hope others also think twice before giving their business to companies using such tactics.

LOL it's about "Zen" now?

Half a decade ago they were claiming ownership of "desk".

2011 HN discussion of their tiff with freshdesk.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3311496

Zendesk recently sent their customers (at least me) a survey asking about thoughts regarding changing their own name from zendesk to something else.

What is wrong in using the word 'zen'? It is not like you name your child 'zen' and other people shouldn't name their child 'zen'.

I think zendesk fears that if people use the word 'zen' and they are better then them, they will lose customers. If you want your brand to remain unique, just try to be better than all others. There is nothing to fear, If you are better, people will use your product else they will use some other.

BTW there are many alternative for zendesk and which are doing better than zendesk. I believe Freshdesk(https://freshdesk.com) is doing better than zendesk. So may be that is why zendesk fears.

Also they always exchanged words with freshdesk. Even markdown has commented about that:(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750875)

Surely the alleged infringers just need to appear at a trial in order for Autodesk to be laughed out of court with an award of costs against them?

Shouldn't there be some sort of government action against these sorts of bullying crimes, removal of trademarks for false allegations of infringement would be a good start to rationalising business uses of IP laws.

I'm not sure if this is the case, but I remember reading somewhere than in order to keep your trademark, you have to show that you defend it (ie. bully other companies with the same name).

TFA "may increase the chance of confusion" between Zendesk and other assholes like Kik.

The Kik case was different. In that case, Kik was a) a word which had no other usage outside the startup that it represents it/no historical prior use, and b) the existing npm package held by another developer was an exact name match.

kik.com in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19980115104316/http://kik.com

List of KIK used as a TLA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik

So you agree that Zendesk have shown themselves to be bigger assholes even than Kik?

is that why ZenPayroll re-branded to Gusto?

Reminds me of Intel suing Yoga studio for being named "Yoga Inside" (infringing on Intel's "Intel inside" campaign slogan)

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Intel-forces-yoga-gro...

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