Case Study: Gawker achieves rapid, personalized support for 4,000+ readers after a security breach with Zendesk

Gawker - Customer Case Study

Gawker Media, publisher of popular sites like Gawker and Gizmodo with a combined audience of about 20 million US readers, faced a major challenge when a December 2010 security breach prompted thousands of reader questions. Lacking a dedicated, secure support system and used to handling rare support requests by email and community boards, the company needed a way to manage a sudden, high-volume, personalized response load.

Gawker trialed Zendesk, onboarded 20 staff, and used macros, triggers and automations to process roughly 4,000 support requests in four days while routing technical issues to engineers. The system enabled fast, private communication, reduced long-term staffing to a rotating team of 3–4 agents, and let Gawker quickly scale responses, save time, and refocus on its core content mission.

Gawker

Greg Takayama

Product Lead