Data Sources for eDiscovery Professionals
Zendesk
Company Snapshot
Zendesk, Inc. is a privately‑held SaaS provider of omnichannel customer‑experience software used by more than 100,000 organizations worldwide. Following its 2022 take‑private transaction by Permira and Hellman & Friedman, the company reported trailing‑twelve‑month revenue of ≈ $1.58 billion and has publicly targeted $3 billion by 2027.
Origin
Zendesk was founded in 2007 in a Copenhagen loft by Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl to build a simpler, more elegant help‑desk application. The startup relocated its headquarters to San Francisco in 2009, went public in 2014, and today operates 19 global offices while continuing to expand its CX portfolio through strategic acquisitions.
The Zendesk Platform (Sunshine)
Zendesk’s core architecture is a multi‑tenant, API‑first cloud platform branded Sunshine. Key characteristics relevant to eDiscovery:
Unified data model – Tickets, users, organizations, calls, chats, and custom objects share common IDs, simplifying joins and lineage.
Audit‑friendly metadata – Every ticket update generates immutable events accessible via the Incremental Exports API.
1200+ pre‑built integrations plus a robust REST/GraphQL API layer for custom connectors.
Extracting Zendesk Data for Investigation
| Full Account Export (Admin Center ➜ Data Export) | JSON, CSV, or XML for tickets, users, orgs | Up to entire instance | Only available on Growth/Professional+; include export timestamp in chain‑of‑custody. |
| Incremental Exports API | Tickets, ticket events, users, orgs changed since last cursor | Continuous | Ideal for rolling collections; throttle to stay under API rate limits. |
| Audit Log Export (UI or API) | Admin actions & security events (CSV) | Low | Enterprise only; filter by date/IP before export for tighter scope. |
| Explore Dataset Export | Scheduled CSV snapshots of analytics datasets | Daily–Monthly | Good for preserving historical KPIs and dashboards under legal hold. |
| Sell Account Export | CRM deals, contacts, activities (CSV) | Moderate | Exports emailed to requester; link valid for 30 days. |
| Third‑party SIEM/ETL connectors | Streaming audit logs to S3, Snowflake, etc. | Continuous | Tools like Panther or custom scripts use Support API for log capture. |
Preservation note: Ticket comments may contain embedded attachments. Use the Attachments API to pull binary files and hash each artifact upon receipt.
Common eDiscovery & Investigation Use Cases
- Data‑breach response – Locate and export tickets containing regulated PII or PHI.
- Privacy & DSAR compliance – Produce all personal data linked to a requester across tickets, calls, chats, and Sell records.
- Product liability & warranty litigation – Review long‑tail support threads, voice transcripts, and IoT logs attached to tickets.
- Employment disputes – Analyze HR or IT help‑desk conversations to build event timelines.
- Regulatory audits – Preserve audit‑log CSVs and Explore KPI exports for SOX or ISO 27001 evidence.
Other Zendesk-owned Products
- Sunshine Conversations – Unified messaging APIs across web, mobile, and social channels
- Zendesk Chat – Real‑time web chat widget.
- Zendesk Talk – Cloud contact‑center voice with Amazon Connect.
- Zendesk Guide – Knowledge‑base and self‑service portal.
- Zendesk Explore – Analytics and dashboarding
- Zendesk Sell – Sales CRM
- Tymeshift – Workforce management for CX teams
- Klaus – AI‑powered quality assurance for conversations
- Local Measure – Contact‑center voice & AI
- Outbound.io, Zopim Chat, BIME Analytics, and other past acquisitions extend the suite with customer engagement, chat, and BI capabilities.