At its flagship conference, Relate, Zendesk unveiled new solutions that are designed to put conversations at the centre of customer relationship management.
The company also announced a new employee experience offering that aims to help companies transform internal operations and create the best hybrid work experience.
Zendesk CEO and founder Mikkel Svane comments on the announcements saying, "The last few years have made it obvious that digital is the front door, convenience is paramount and relationships are anchored in conversations. Zendesk is helping businesses embrace this new generation of conversational customer relationship management and turn customer service into an engine for growth.
Zendesk's approach to Conversational CRM connects and integrates front and back offices to not only enable the front office to provide support, but also to provide a range of real-time data and services for customer engagement.
Recognising that customers want to engage on their terms and on their preferred channels with speed, convenience and immediacy, Zendesk now offers:
- Conversational automation with more sophisticated bots to expand automation to messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, build and train custom bots to address common issues and match customer questions coming in from the front office to the right answers informed with third-party data.
- Omnichannel routing to adapt to changing conditions, staff support teams appropriately and make changes based on customer demand in real-time. Teams can ensure conversations get automatically routed to the right agent, on any channel and closely monitor performance to better staff and react to customer demand.
- Conversational Data Orchestration that lets businesses create convenient customer conversations at scale by connecting processes, event data and custom logic.
- Analytics to provide smarter sales and service to help businesses turn conversations into revenue with data-driven insights. Custom reporting capabilities allow teams to manage high volumes and analyse historical trends to provide better staffing on the channels customers and prospects communicate on.
- Conversational channels in Zendesk Sell, starting with WhatsApp, that let sales teams message with customers and capture every interaction automatically in Sell where it can be managed, tracked and reported on.
Zendesk's employee experience offering builds on more than 15 years of providing customer service solutions and brings together the Zendesk Suite with additional capabilities such as integrated self service, case management and Zendesk professional services.
With this offering, Zendesk gives employee support teams:
- A single source of truth for HR, Finance, Operations, IT and other support teams who are crucial to connecting employees with internal services.
- A way to remove repetition, friction and unnecessary administrative processes, making it easier for employees to have access to critical information, resources and services.
- The insights to understand trends and emerging issues in order to continually improve the employee experience.
Michael Pace, vice president of global member services, Virgin Pulse, comments, "Virgin Pulse serves 14 million members across 190 countries, but we believe our employees are the number one driver of members being successful in their journey and delivering our business goals.
"Zendesk enables us to ensure that our members and employees are both receiving accurate, timely responses, regardless of which channel they choose to contact us. This partnership has translated to tangible return on investment and value for our clients and company.
Zendesk's Conversational CRM experience and employee experience offering are powered by the Sunshine Platform. The Sunshine Platform helps companies customise Zendesk quickly using apps, tools, and pre-built capabilities that fit their systems.
