Zendesk Unveils New Conversational CRM Solutions

Zendesk unveiled new solutions for conversational customer relationship management. Zendesk’s approach to conversational CRM connects and integrates front and back offices to enable the front office to provide support and provide a range of intelligent, real-time data and services for customer engagement.

Zendesk will offer conversational automation, omnichannel routing, conversational data orchestration, analytics to provide smarter sales and service and conversational channels in Zendesk Sell. Conversational automation with bots will enable businesses to expand automation to messaging apps, 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 will give businesses the power 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 will let businesses create convenient customer conversations at scale by connecting processes, event data and custom logic. Analytics to provide smarter sales and service will help businesses turn conversations into revenue with data-driven insights. Custom reporting capabilities allow teams to manage high volumes and analyze historical trends to provide better staffing on the channels customers and prospects communicate on.

Conversational channels in Zendesk Sell, starting with WhatsApp, will let sales teams message with customers and capture every interaction automatically in Sell where it can be managed, tracked and reported on.

"Before Zendesk, we had a fragmented network of support systems across the world. Today, we run everything under one platform, centralized to provide the best consistent, quality experiences to all our customers on any channel they prefer,” said Orlando Gadea, global vice president of customer experience transformation, Stanley Black and Decker.

Zendesk also announced a new employee experience offering to help companies transform internal operations and create the best hybrid work experience during Relate.

With the change in needs and expectations employees have as businesses embrace hybrid work environments, employee support teams also need an efficient way to transform the way they work with capabilities such as simplified workflows and automation.

Zendesk’s employee experience offering will build on more than 15 years of providing customer service and will bring together the Zendesk Suite, with additional capabilities like integrated self-service, easy-to-use case management and Zendesk professional services.

Through Zendesk, employee support teams are provided a single source of truth for human resources, finance, operations, IT and other support teams who help 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; and the insights to understand trends and emerging issues to continually improve the employee experience.

“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,” said Michael Pace (News - Alert), vice president of global member services, Virgin Pulse. “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, which helps companies customize Zendesk quickly using apps, tools and pre-built capabilities that fit their systems.

Edited by Erik Linask