Page 76 - DCAP609_CLOUD_COMPUTING

Unit 5: Cloud Computing for the Community

Notes
Latin America, Asia and Africa with local account executives stationed in many cities.
Groupon seeks to sell only quality products and services, be honest and direct with
customers, and provide exceptional customer service.
"Within a few months of our founding, our customer base exploded," says Joe Harrow,
Director of Customer Service, Groupon. "At first, I was spending 10 percent of my time
responding to customer requests. It gradually became a job for several agents. We realized
we simply couldn't go on without a real ticketing solution."
Convinced that Groupon's rapid growth would continue, Harrow researched several
enterprise-level support solutions. But he didn't find a good fit.
"The enterprise-level solutions seemed complicated and difficult to set up," Harrow recalls.
"They would have increased our efficiency, but at the cost of hampering the customer
experience." Harrow then searched the web for online support software and found Zendesk.
After a quick evaluation of Zendesk, Harrow knew he had the right solution.
"Right off the bat, Zendesk was intuitive to use," Harrow says. "It seemed more powerful
and robust than other online support solutions, and it had been rated very highly in
reviews we'd read. Plus, we knew that because it was a web-based solution, it could easily
scale to support our increasing volume."
Groupon now employs more than 150 customer support agents, who handle nearly 15,000
tickets per day. Zendesk's macros, which are predefined answers to FAQs, are Groupon's
favorite Zendesk feature. These macros help Groupon train its agents to deliver one of the
company's customer service hallmarks: one-touch resolution.
Groupon has also found it easy to integrate Zendesk with other solutions. By integrating
Zendesk with GoodData, Groupon has extended and enhanced its reporting - going well
beyond the limits of its old spreadsheets. As an example of the sort of scalability that SaaS
brings, Groupon recently processed its millionth customer ticket.

Questions
1. Define SaaS.
2. Discuss about the characteristics of SaaS.

3. What is Groupon? How did SaaS allow groupon to Scale Customer Service?
Source: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/understanding-the-cloud-
computing-stack-saas-paas-iaas

5.7 Summary

Cloud computing is beneficial for the entire community, home users to sports teams to
school organizations and so on. Any time any group of people in the community need to
communicate and collaborate, they need to switch to Web-based applications.
The main objective of cloud computing is to enable easy access to emails in any part of the
world at any given time. Email has been around almost as long as computer
networks and long predates the arrival of the Internet.

Using Web-based email service, such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft’s
Windows Live Hotmail is a more convenient option for communication.

Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the
equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and
networking components.

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