deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
Lewis Hamilton was thirteen years old at the 1998 Autosport Awards when he walked up to Ron Dennis, CEO of the world champion team McLaren, and told him "I want to drive your car". He knew that being the best driver also requires being in the best team. He put himself on their radar.
This instinct is the right one. If you want to be best at something, get time with the people who already are. As a physics undergrad, I made sure to get in the room when Alain Aspect visited the faculty. When I was opening a bar and needed to nail the cocktail menu, I got myself into a series of seminars with Alex Kratena. When I was starting my Zendesk agency I first got to events where I could meet the best Zendesk experts. A few of the people I learned from in those rooms are reading this now.
MrBeast wrote "Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work." The cake guy already paid for the mistakes.
Years after that award ceremony, Hamilton has seven world championships, over a hundred grand prix victories, with reported earnings in the hundreds of millions. So when I see job listings declare "we only hire the best", I assume they're trying to put Hamilton behind the wheel of their delivery van.
They are not. Put Hamilton and an average driver in a Ford Transit in London traffic and the difference is zero. The difference in hourly rate is a million pounds. So what matters? Your business should know what differentiates your offering from the competition.
When you know what your thing is, you know when a job is right for you and when you might want to recommend someone else. For us, that's being the Zendesk agency that treats your instance like the rest of your mission-critical business systems. That's a position of strength to be in. You know where to concentrate your resources. We need the best Zendesk engineers, because that's our thing. Everything else only needs to be good enough to keep that going.
What caught our attention
2 sources · competitor,ai · 2026-05-13
This looks like a major repositioning but is really a relatively sensible rebrand of the kind I imagine Carphone Warehouse wish they had thought of in the 1990s.
2 sources · industry · 2026-05-11
We keep coming back to the question of how to assess these implementations. Have you defined what success looks like and are you measuring real results?
1 source · industry,competitor · 2026-05-14
Zendesk may have admitted defeat in trying to make Sell the new Salesforce but the battle between these two is far from over.
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Refinements across the UI, driven by real user testing, make a complex Zendesk instance easier to navigate. Chip and badge legends throughout, page-scoped assistance, collapsible trigger categories, and clearer search results when there's nothing to show. |
| Macros now expose their scope at a glance with a visibility column and a restriction filter, so you can see which groups can use each one without opening it. |
| Deltastring AI assistant now answers Zendesk questions in-platform in Beacon's voice. A new logic-analysis pass also flags automations whose name and conditions don't match, so you find the drift before your users do. |
| Spreadsheet imports now preserve notification actions, multi-value conditions, and tagger options exactly. What goes through a sheet comes back unchanged. |
AI-native support platform
| Consent status now has a public API. Look up whether a user has granted consent for a specific purpose without loading the full registry. |
| Performance related iteration. Improved caching, changes to knowledge indexing. |
Worth your time
As everything we read becomes AI generated, remember that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
If you're feeling like you're not getting the response to your content it deserves, you may find it reassuring that LinkedIn loves mediocrity.
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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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