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Customer engagement is increasingly important for retailers, as online businesses offer more goods at lower prices than brick-and-mortar, and everyone's wallets are a little harder to open than ever. That's putting a particular premium on engaged customers and improving the customer experience, a point that's driving lots of development in customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Zendesk recently distinguished itself in this field with a new award from Gartner (News - Alert).

Gartner's Magic Quadrant report classifies certain businesses into one of four fields based on two criteria: completeness of corporate vision and ability to execute. Those who score high in both fields are considered leaders, while those who score lower are considered niche players. High vision but low ability makes a company visionary, while high ability and low vision makes a company a challenger. Zendesk landed a “leader” classification on the strength of several of its tools all together in one.

With a messenger tool available in Zendesk Message—now part of an early access program for those who want to try it out—to the Advanced Voice tool that allows users to manage various support channels and take calls from anywhere using either mobile device or Zendesk browser tool, Zendesk offers several options in terms of voice communication.

Beyond that, however, Zendesk has also embraced the idea of analytics, with both its Satisfaction Prediction and BIME Analytics systems. Satisfaction Prediction uses machine learning and predictive analytics systems to figure out how likely it is for a customer service ticket to end well based on what's known about similar tickets. That's recently launched in beta, and has handled over seven million interactions to date. BIME Analytics presents data visualizations, pulling data across several live sources as fodder.

It's not just retail that's facing the need for better customer engagement; increasing numbers of applications going to cloud-based models also mean a clear need for better customer engagement, as countries worldwide get involved across a variety of levels of operational complexity. Basically, most any firm with customers, regardless of whether these are normal consumers or other businesses, are likely to need CRM capability to help keep track of all those customers and provide the best in service. Zendesk's commitment to not only meeting today's needs but also tomorrow's likely gave it a real leg up on the Gartner rankings, and helps make it clear why this company is a leader in the field.

The ranking on the Magic Quadrant study is a feather in Zendesk's cap, but looking at the cap itself shows a terrific product line backed up by continuing innovation and a commitment to meet needs. That's the kind of thing that should make a leader, and for Zendesk, likely has.