deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
Ed Zitron's latest at Where's Your Ed At? makes the case that OpenAI is running the Uber playbook: burn VC money operating at a loss, undercut everyone, last man standing wins. He's right about the playbook. But I want to push back a little on what it means for the rest of us.
Plenty of people had loads of cheap Uber rides during the burn-money years. We had Graze boxes turn up for next to nothing — a free little parcel of nuts and dried fruit, fun while it lasted. We all got some value out of those products before the price reset. Now an Uber costs more than a black cab in most cities and I use it maybe two or three times a year?
It's really okay to make good use of underpriced products. Take advantage. But have a clear sense of what your support stack costs the day the investors want their return. If a tool you depend on is obviously being sold below cost today, use it well but know what next year looks like when it's priced for profit.
From Deltastring
Founders all want to be Steve Jobs when customers want us to be Tim Cook. Exciting and bold has a time and a place. Mostly we all just want things to do what they are supposed to and get out of the way.
What caught our attention
2 sources · industry · 2026-04-30
Messaging is steadily eating the phone queue. Is your team set up for conversations that stretch over hours rather than minutes?
2 sources · industry · 2026-04-30
Adobe and Accenture together is an interesting signal. The integrators are picking favourites, and that tells you more about who survives the consolidation than any product demo will.
2 sources · industry · 2026-04-30
Per-seat pricing was the support industry's load-bearing assumption. As outcome-based becomes the norm, every CS budget conversation gets rewritten. What will your next bill look like?
1 source · features · 2026-04-30
Agents now have wallets. We're a year or two from support agents resolving billing disputes by actually moving money. Are your refund policies ready for a robot to read them? The implications are wild.
1 source · competitor · 2026-04-30
Either Salesforce don't know what to build, or they want users to feel ownership of what they're already going to ship. Which read feels truer?
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Tag collision detection now prevents conflicts when promoting across Zendesk instances, automatically identifying and resolving duplicate tags before push. |
| Cloud spreadsheet integration now supports Microsoft Excel Online via OneDrive, Google Sheets with shared permissions visibility and three-way conflict detection during import. |
| Spreadsheet exports now include intelligence columns showing dependency counts and impact analysis, with colour-coded guardrails, cell notes, and hyperlinks for easier review. |
| Promotion results page shows detailed success/failure breakdown with retry capability, and new dependency graph tool surfaces object relationships for safer cross-instance moves. |
| Security hardening across authentication, file handling, and API including JWT security upgrade, 10 MB upload limit, SSRF protection, and open redirect prevention. |
CX platform news, aggregated and analysed
| Blog descriptions now truncate cleanly at sentence or word boundaries instead of cutting off mid-word |
| Stories are organised into tiers on dedicated pages for easier navigation |
| Semantic clustering groups related stories |
| Newsletter layout has been improved for better readability |
Worth your time
Help Desk Picker Dima Lazarchuk has vibe-coded a clever pros-and-cons comparison of dozens of helpdesk platforms. We get commissioned for the deep dives, but the harder problem for a growing business is often the earlier one: where to start, what to rule out, what merits a closer look. This is a great first sift.
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What happened in Zendesk this week
Platform changes, security updates, and honest opinions from someone who builds on Zendesk every day. One email, Fridays.
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