The Zendesk world needs a Marques Brownlee

can I say MKBZD?

You’re probably familiar with Marques Brownlee. He’s the undisputed king of Youtube tech reviews and has sidelines in car reviews, podcasts, advertising things like laptop covers and his sleep tracking mattress or something. I phase out when he starts talking about sleep tracking to be honest. Today there has been a bunch of fuss over his new app which I guess he probably described to someone as the Spotify of phone wallpapers. Very old school thing to launch, like a n-gate Ycombinator parody “Uber for dogs” but we shall see.

What has this got to do with Zendesk?

Wallpapers aren’t something I’m interested in, not staring at real or virtual walls a whole lot, but I do have opinions on the process of reviewing and criticism, particularly as it relates to user experience. This is Brownlee’s forte, he is the best around for identifying where the user experience falls down. I don’t get the sense he worries too much about the process behind the interface.

The same is definitely true of your users, both the agents and the end users they support. As far as they are concerned, everything that happens outside of their direct actions might as well be magic. We want the technology to get out of the way. Connect the person with the problem to the person who can solve that problem.

What Zendesk engineering challenges does this create?

The biggest issue I come across, working with clients of varying scales and across multiple sectors, is where users bring solutions rather than problems. “We need a macro to say X and apply tag Y” is a solution but the person making the request doesn’t see the big picture and may not know about all the available functionality. Let your Zendesk admin know what you’re looking to achieve and they will work with you to get it done.

The Zendesk ticket lifecycle.

I think it is the same with Marques Brownlee. He sees problems, but I don’t feel like he is someone I would go to for solutions. You see that in the way he has struggled to monetise his audience. There is a sense that he and his team are just going to try stuff until something works. You can’t do that in CX. People will go elsewhere.

What can we learn from Marques?

What sets the MKBHD reviews apart from other channels I think is the way Marques tests these products. Other reviewers set aside some time to work through the things that a new piece of tech does. I think Marques just grabs it and heads out in to his daily life. It’s easy to spot where an AI assistant gadget falls down if you’re out and about and your phone does the job better. At your desk following a series of test processes, it’s easy to get things right.

In the same way, your users, whether agents or end users, aren’t using your Zendesk under optimum conditions. They are in a hurry, perhaps under some pressure to get this task done and do the next thing in their day. They will tick the wrong box. They will not understand further questions to the full extent. Agents will apply one macro over another. End users will just click whichever option gets them the attention they need.

It’s in these situations that even the best planned processes can crumble. Tickets will drop out of your carefully designed views, because you didn’t anticipate these field value combinations. A new request might go to the wrong agent group, because your end user just clicked at random in the drop-down. How can we avoid that?

What does Marques get wrong?

One thing I see again and again from MKBHD is that Marques doesn’t consider his situation unusual. He makes Youtube videos for a living, which is great but almost no one else out there does that. When I buy a new laptop, it is because I have some work to do. Fundamentally, I want the technology to get out of my way and let me do the thing. The problem is, “doing the thing” looks different at my desk to his. Exporting 8k footage from Final Cut has different requirements to juggling windows of VS Code, Excel, Notepad++ and so on. But I am sure that the vast majority of people who work on computers use Excel daily and Final Cut never.

That’s not to say there’s no space for finding the joy in tech, but these things are a means to an end for almost all of us in 2024. I’m not preordering the latest gadget these days, just trying to help my users achieve more and complain less.

That said, I did move my home office around and take a quick ugly snap at the weekend. What do you think?

Nico’s desk in his home office and studio space.