Help Desk Software Startup Zendesk Raises $19 Million

million round of Series C funding today led by Matrix Partners with participation from Benchmark Capital and Charles River Ventures, putting the 3-year-old startup’s total funding to date at about $25.5 million.

Zendesk, which manages customer service responses for companies like Groupon and RackSpace, does away with the phone tree and gives both customers and employees transparency into how customer inquires are being handled.

For instance, both the customer and the company’s customer response team can see which employee is handing the customer’s ticket and when that employee is expected to respond.

The service is within a price range that small businesses with small customer bases can afford, but it also counts a number of companies with puny employee-to-customer ratios like Groupon and Twitter.

The company recently acquired its 5,000th paying customer, and CEO Mikkel Svane says it’s achieved about a 300% revenue increase in 2010.

With the $19 million of new funding, Zendesk is planning to expand the number of channels to which customers can submit inquiries and continue its aggressive innovation (the company has launched four new features for its product in the last three months).

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