Hi everyone!

We have some exciting news. Zendesk is making a big investment in our user community, and you’ll start seeing some changes in the coming weeks. We want the community to serve your needs the best we can, and that means we want to hear from you! 

Here’s what we’ve heard from you so far: 

• You want us to be more responsive to your product feedback and more transparent in communications about our development roadmap. We’ve known that your experience with sharing product feedback has been less than awesome (okay, it’s bad – we know it’s bad) for a long time. Here’s how we’ll make it better:
  
  We’re rolling out new internal processes, and a new internal feature request tracking system. You’ll get more communication and engagement directly from product managers, and have more visibility about what we’re working on.  
  
  To create this visibility, we launched a space in the community for product team members to blog about what they’re working on, how they’re thinking about different features and use cases, and where we’ll include all release announcements. Check out the Zendesk Product Blog 
  
  We’ll also host more events to demonstrate new releases and offer more opportunities for Q&A and feedback directly with the product teams.

• Two hundred of you shared ideas and feedback in a survey earlier this year. Hear about the results of that survey and how we're responding here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqEMLAUaPL4
  
  
• We have also been conducting small group conversations to get feedback from you, and we plan to continue holding these throughout the year. Subscribe to the Community Info & Announcements topic to participate.

Changes coming to the community 

Alongside these improvements, we’re doing a bunch of maintenance to make things easier to find and navigate. For example, we’ll clean up the community by archiving posts that are out of date, rarely viewed, or no longer relevant. Old comments on Help Center articles will also get cleaned up and archived. We’re importing all product feedback into our new tool, and then will be archiving any posts that have been inactive (haven’t received any new comments) for more than 9 months.

In October, we’ll be making some changes to the community itself. The community topics are going to be renamed and organized differently to open up spaces for broader conversations to help you in your work, and also to better reflect the evolving Zendesk Suite. At that time, we’ll also be merging the Developer and User communities into a single, unified Zendesk Community so that you only have one place to log in for all of your community needs. Just head to zendesk.com/community to participate in conversations.

Later in the year, we’ll be launching a new program to recognize our community super-users, and we’ll be rolling out some badges. Finally, we’re planning a great week of content and events in the community in November to celebrate this first round of improvements and share more about our vision for the future.

It’s going to be a lot of change, but we’re really excited about it. Every step of the way, we want our decisions to be informed by you. The goal of all of this is to create a better, more useful, more fun community for you.

We invite you to share your thoughts on what you’d like to see or questions that you have in the comments below, or you can sign up for one of our upcoming listening sessions. We look forward to talking with you soon!

Sincerely, 

The Zendesk Community Team
Nicole, Brett, Devan, and Dave