Article • 3 min read
Zendesk welcomes Smooch, a platform for messaging
By Shawna Wolverton, Senior Vice President, Product at Zendesk
Last updated September 21, 2021
With over seventy-two trillion messages sent in 2018 across messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, it’s no surprise that 68% of consumers choose messaging as their preferred way to communicate with businesses. Customers are growing more comfortable with sending a message to a business just like they would to their friends and families—it brings an extra degree of convenience and familiarity to the customer experience.
But it’s challenging for companies to accommodate popular messaging channels and offer a fluid conversation across a global customer base. The current fragmented messaging landscape is highly susceptible to changing customer trends, making it difficult for businesses to provide a messaging experience that can keep pace.
Smooch has solved this problem by building a conversation platform that brings together context, formatting, and other data from various messaging channels. Zendesk has been a long-time partner of Smooch and already uses it to bring messaging to our customers; and just like us, they believe in the importance of having a single source of truth to keep the conversation going—even when a customer’s conversation spans different channels.
That shared vision leads us to an exciting announcement: today, we’re welcoming Smooch to the Zendesk family.
Continuous conversations, all in one place
Smooch’s platform standardizes communication across social messaging channels and across its own web and mobile SDKs — meaning businesses can follow a conversation thread from any messaging channel while providing their customers with a consistent messaging experience.
Social messaging
Zendesk customers can seamlessly integrate their customer support with the most popular messaging channels like WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and more. It adds a new element to the omnichannel experience—agents can easily switch between social messaging channels, chat, email, or phone calls from a unified workspace; and customers can engage on the channels they prefer.
Web and mobile-based messaging
Smooch will augment Zendesk’s embeddables, enabling businesses to build native conversational experiences on their websites and/or mobile apps. These home-grown experiences can be built to be more immersive and interactive, with enhancements like bots, buttons and lists, and customizing the look and feel of the messaging to match a company’s brand and personality.
What you can try out today
WhatsApp for the Zendesk Suite: For support teams, Smooch will connect customers on their messaging channel of choice, starting with WhatsApp Business, to tie conversations into an omnichannel agent workspace. And to build off our current WhatsApp integration with Zendesk Support, Smooch will help power our new integration between WhatsApp and Zendesk Chat.
Conversation Solutions Team: Zendesk customers can also leverage our Conversation Solutions Team—a group of messaging experts who help businesses craft personalized messaging experiences. They’ll help create custom, omnichannel solutions for engaging customers instantly over the web, through mobile apps, and through the world’s most popular messaging channels.
The future is promising with Smooch and Zendesk together—we’re excited to see our customers build messaging experiences that will blow away their own customers’ expectations. If you’re interested in learning more, you can sign up here.
Welcome, Smooch!
