GitHub makes Zendesk the foundation of elevated employee service

GitHub is the world’s largest and most advanced development platform, empowering more than 150 million developers and 4 million businesses globally. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company offers AI-powered tools, built-in security testing, and seamless integration to support customers from first commit to enterprise development.

GitHub has been a Zendesk customer for well over a decade, with the partnership evolving from purely external customer support to becoming a key tool for internal employee service, as well.

Fast forward to today and GitHub has embedded Zendesk across a wide range of internal services to support its more than 3,000 employees–from onboarding new employees, streamlining HR requests, and managing IT support–to supporting events and offices around the globe.

Evolving the employee experience at scale

The challenge for GitHub was to transition its employees from a highly personalized–but high-touch and high cost–”white-glove” internal service model to an automated approach without sacrificing the human touch.

For years, GitHub’s internal employee support ran on a patchwork of systems and high-touch workflows. From new hire onboarding and IT requests to HR inquiries, processes were manual, siloed, and increasingly difficult to scale.

“As we grew, we needed to evolve our employee experience,” says Ashley Sprague, Senior Director of IT & Corporate Engineering at GitHub. “It wasn’t just about speed–it was about delivering support that felt personalized, intuitive, and trustworthy.

Eliminating “swivel chair” work with automation

GitHub turned to Zendesk Suite Enterprise to transform employee support into a streamlined, high-performing operation that spans across key internal teams including IT, HR, Security, Data, Finance, and Workplace Experience (WX).

One major success story of the transformation project was employee onboarding. By integrating Zendesk with Workday and GitHub’s own access management tools, the team built an automated onboarding flow that gets new hires what they need without overwhelming HR teams.

New employees are added to Workday, triggering entitlement provisioning managed in GitHub. This process creates end-user accounts in Zendesk via Okta, granting access to help centers secured by Okta authentication.

A webhook to Workday enriches Zendesk user profiles with key employee data in custom fields. This gives HR, IT, and WX teams critical context within Zendesk, eliminating the need to access external systems.

“We grant access to help centers and populate profiles with contextual info on day one,” says Sprague. “It eliminates the ‘swivel-chair’ work for admins and ensures our new hires can be productive faster.”

Employee CSAT scores soar

With more than 60,000 internal tickets per month across multiple instances, scalability was obviously a top priority.

Another substantial win came from rethinking the ticketing experience. Previously, employees had to navigate 10 different support ticket forms containing 72 fields. With Zendesk’s dynamic forms and embedded AI, GitHub simplified that down to a single form–intelligent enough to adapt based on input.

“People don’t want to choose from 10 drop-downs just to get help,” says Sprague. “Now, they just tell us what they need, and Zendesk handles the rest.”

The GitHub team also rolled out access via Slack and mobile, making it easy for employees to request support in the regular flow of work. The results are impressive with new hire CSAT scores consistently exceeding 98 percent and companywide CSAT averaging 95 percent.

Asset management done right

GitHub also uses Oomnitza’s IT asset intelligence and automation solution, integrated with Zendesk to further streamline employee service and automate IT asset-related workflows across its growing global workforce.

By connecting Oomnitza’s IT asset intelligence within the Zendesk platform, GitHub enables IT agents to instantly view and act on employee asset context—such as assigned laptops and onboarding tasks–without switching solutions.

This integration has reduced time-to-resolution by 15 percent for asset-related tickets, improved asset provisioning security, and decreased manual escalations across HR and IT.

With better visibility, control, and automation, GitHub delivers increased IT agility for its employees, while maintaining operational control at scale and staying in compliance with audit requirements.

Meeting enterprise security standards

With sensitive HR and IT data flowing through Zendesk, security and privacy were top priorities for GitHub. The company leverages Zendesk’s Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP) role-based access controls, data retention policies, and audit logs to maintain strict compliance.

“HR-related tickets contain sensitive data, and role-based access control ensures that information stays confidential,” shares Sprague.

Additionally, recent updates to Zendesk reporting have made managing data permissions even more efficient and secure and reduced the number of dashboards that need to be created and managed.

“By making security an integral part of the employee service experience, we reinforce trust and compliance at every touchpoint,” Sprague says.

A future of proactive employee support

GitHub is quickly moving from a reactive employee support model to a proactive one, where the Zendesk platform will anticipate employee needs and support them before they even have to ask.

And while GitHub uses some AI today, the team sees a future where smart automation enhances service even further, allowing HR and IT teams to focus on what matters most: the people.

“If I had to describe Zendesk in one word,” concludes Sprague, “it would be foundational. It empowers our people teams to serve better, our IT teams to scale smarter, and our employees to get what they need–fast. That’s where the real value lies.”