At Zendesk, we’re big believers in the power of messaging to keep people together.
While the momentum behind messaging has been building up for a decade, we’ve seen the use of messaging apps grow exponentially during the past year. The pandemic, which has changed the way we live, has also changed how we communicate, connect, and work. With platforms like Facebook — WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct — seeing increased usage across all their properties in the first half of 2020, it’s no surprise that businesses have gotten the message too.
We’re excited to announce our new messaging partnership with Facebook 🎉
Facebook’s family of apps are familiar figures in our daily lives. The move to messaging marks a natural shift in communication for businesses, too — there are already 40 million businesses active on Messenger alone, WhatsApp’s usage has surged up to 164% in Latin America, and Instagram has recently opened their API to businesses for the first time.
With Zendesk’s vision of keeping the customer at the center of everything, improving the agent experience, and deriving insight from customer conversations, our partnership with Facebook is critical to incorporating modern messaging throughout the customer journey. We are committed to helping businesses embrace the trends that are here to stay.
Zendesk’s new messaging capabilities and Answer Bot with Flow Builder are helping our customers provide conversational experiences that flow seamlessly across channels and devices while remaining engaging, personal and contextual. Our partnership with Facebook, which provides Zendesk business customers access to simple API tools to connect with their customers on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, is integral to this evolution.
“It’s critical that we are constantly in communication with customers, which is why our support teams rely on Zendesk to share real-time information and immediately respond to questions across channels like Facebook. Messaging is becoming the default mode of communication, and we’re looking forward to making the customer experience even more engaging across additional messaging channels with these new Zendesk capabilities.”
Leanna Nazzisi, Manager, Customer Operations and Communications, Birchbox
Better social messaging
Messaging apps meet peoples’ expectations for convenience. People are rapidly shifting to messaging apps as the primary way to communicate with friends, family, and businesses. Worldwide, 175 million people already message business accounts on WhatsApp, and users are delivering roughly 100 billion messages every day.
For Zendesk customers, conversations from WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram can be set up in the Admin Center alongside other social channels so agents can engage faster, enable conversational commerce, and solve issues more quickly. Zendesk’s ongoing collaboration with Facebook will ensure focus on the most important product capabilities to get customers up and running more quickly.
Read more about Zendesk’s new messaging capabilities
Our unified agent workspace allows support teams to manage and respond to customers from any channel in a single place, with complete conversation history and context — which means customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Customers can start a conversation on the web, and carry it on their preferred messaging app — be it WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram — on their own terms and when it’s convenient for them.
Enhancing customer conversations
With features built into Facebook’s products, like Instagram’s “DM me” story sticker, click-to-message Facebook ads, and click-to-chat WhatsApp buttons, it’s effortless for businesses to start conversations with their customers.
In order to scale conversations across messaging channels, brands can automate FAQs, set autoresponders, and build AI-powered workflows with Answer Bot — straight out of the box. Support teams can easily build conversational flows within Zendesk without needing to code. For example, a retailer can offer support on FAQs like store locations, payments, or shipping and returns. When customers message the business, they will be greeted by a bot — but if the customer requires immediate assistance, they can escalate to a live conversation on their favorite channel.
It’s easier than ever to manage your customer conversations with Zendesk. Zendesk’s platform offerings will make creating custom conversational experiences on owned messaging channels, alongside Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram feel intuitive and effortless.
