Article • 6 min read
How Zendesk is transforming CX in 2020
Af Adrian McDermott, President of Products
Senest opdateret July 14, 2022
Customer expectations are higher than ever—so much so that IDC predicts that companies will spend $641 billion on customer experience technologies by 2022 to meet them. Customers want easy, fast, and personalized experiences across touchpoints, and they’re comparing your business to companies that consistently deliver on their needs. When companies prioritize their relationships with their customers, they reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.
But meeting your customers’ expectations doesn’t have to be complicated or costly. To help you provide seamless experiences that grow with the needs of your customers and your business, we’re expanding our service-first CRM solutions with new, powerful Support and Sales Suites, as well as greater functionality for our open and flexible CRM platform, Zendesk Sunshine.
Conversational experiences made easy
A great customer experience is an effortless one. Customers don’t want to have to work hard to contact your business. Increasingly, they want to have the same kinds of natural, conversational interactions they have in their personal lives with your business.
With the launch of the Support Suite and the Sales Suite, we’re expanding our product suites to enable support and sales teams to foster more human conversations with their customers across touchpoints.
Introducing The Zendesk Support Suite
Research is clear: customer service is key to an exceptional customer experience. To drive differentiation, businesses must design the customer experience with service integrated into every interaction in the customer journey. The redesigned Zendesk Support Suite empowers businesses to deliver unified, conversational service across channels, so your customers can reach out however and whenever they like. Here are some of the key features:
Emerging social messaging channels
Research in Zendesk’s Conversational Business Report, State of Messaging 2020 revealed that messaging has the highest satisfaction rating of any channel, with an average CSAT of 98 percent. Messaging is fast, convenient, and asynchronous, allowing customers to reach out and respond on their own time. In addition to other channels such as email, phone, live chat, and SMS, The Support Suite now includes emerging social messaging channels powered by Sunshine Conversations, our recently launched conversational business platform.
This allows companies to seamlessly engage with customers and manage conversations on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, WeChat, and LINE, from one, unified agent workspace. Other capabilities include a live notifications view for agents to easily stay on top of all conversations in real-time, as well as auto-responders so customers will receive an immediate response, even if an agent is not available.
Relevant context, regardless of channel
Behind every customer and each interaction is a story. And Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report 2020 found that 71 percent of customers expect companies to collaborate internally so they don’t have to repeat themselves and tell that story over again each time they seek help or reach out on a new channel.
To provide customers with the fast and personal experiences they expect, the Zendesk Support Suite gives agents all the tools and context they need to resolve customer issues, regardless of channel. No matter what touchpoint a customer reaches out on, agents can view background information and conversation history relevant to each interaction, such as the customer’s email, recent orders, or why they last reached out. This helps to reduce wrap-up time, as agents can update and manage ticket fields, forms, and status from one place—so they don’t have to spend time searching for details and customers can get the outcome they desire.
A unified agent experience
Natural, unified, and customer-centric support experiences on the front end require an integrated workspace for your agents and the back-office team, enabling them to continue the conversation on the channel that makes the most sense. For example, an agent may need to follow up on a chat conversation via email to provide more detailed, step-by-step instructions.
In the new Agent Workspace, part of the Support Suite, agents can respond to customers across channel touchpoints, including, chat, email, voice, and social messaging from one place—saving agents time from toggling between different dashboards and giving customers the convenience and personalization they expect.
The new Agent Workspace also provides agents with the tools they need to customize their support environment based on use cases for more responsive and efficient support. And we made collaboration even easier, too, with the paid Collaboration add-on, which allows agents to loop in other teams across email and Slack, without leaving the support ticket.
Introducing The Zendesk Sales Suite
77 percent of B2B buyers claim their latest purchase was “very difficult.” As new technologies, products, suppliers, and services emerge, and more information is available online, buyers are overwhelmed, which makes sales conversations more important than ever.
But salespeople today are spending less time having sales conversations and more time navigating overly complex internal policies and procedures due to legacy tools and an increased number of point solutions. In fact, sales reps have to manage an average of 14 different sales tools. While the buying process has changed, legacy sales software was not designed to keep up, and instead of helping, it gets in the way.
The new Zendesk Sales Suite removes friction from every part of the sales process so teams can place their focus back where it belongs: on having rewarding conversations and closing more deals. The Sales Suite brings together Zendesk Sell, Chat, Reach, and Voice to allow sales teams to:
Engage with customers in more ways, such as email, SMS, and phone, and see every customer conversation, regardless of channel, in one continuous flow.
Speak with prospects directly on the website through live chat to shorten the sales cycle, engage more buyers, and convert more leads from a single interface.
Personalize the sales dashboard and maximize sales productivity with out-of-the-box prospecting and data enrichment powered by Clearbit.
Here comes the sun
76 percent of customers expect personalization, according to Zendesk Benchmark research. But with companies managing three times as much data as they did five years ago and that data living across siloed systems and software, accessing relevant details about customers has only become more complicated. And without an organized view of the customer that arms teams with the right data, they are essentially left in the dark, making delivering personalized experiences next to impossible.
That’s where Zendesk Sunshine can help. Born in the public cloud, it enables companies to connect and understand all of their customer data with a complete view of their customers’ activity across systems. And today, we’re announcing new functionality to further empower teams to boost productivity and personalize customer experiences. Zendesk Sunshine is now available to everyone, with greater functionality, including:
More powerful features
In addition to Custom Objects, companies can leverage powerful Sunshine features, such as Unified Profiles, Custom Events, and the AWS Events Connector to power differentiated experiences across Zendesk and their own applications. With these capabilities, agents can view every customer interaction regardless of the originating system, tie all of their accounts into one comprehensive picture of the customer, and harness the power of AWS with a real-time streaming events connector.
A new e-commerce integration
We also announced a new Shopify integration that processes real-time events, such as purchases and returns, and gives agents a complete, contextual view of the customer. For example, an agent can see when a customer’s credit card doesn’t go through and provide support so that customer can successfully complete their purchase.
