Zendesk announces new conversational CRM solutions

At its flagship conference Relate, Zendesk has unveiled new solutions that put conversations at the centre of customer relationship management.

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

"The last few years have made it obvious that digital is the front door, convenience is paramount and relationships are anchored in conversations," says Mikkel Svane, CEO and founder, Zendesk.

"Zendesk is helping businesses embrace this new generation of conversational customer relationship management and turn customer service into an engine for growth."

Better business with Conversational CRM
Zendesk's approach to Conversational CRM connects and integrates front and back offices to not only enable the front office to provide support, but also to provide a full range of intelligent, real-time data and services for customer engagement.

Recognising that customers want to engage on their terms and on their preferred channels with speed, convenience and immediacy, Zendesk now offers:

• Conversational automation with more sophisticated bots that enable businesses to expand automation to messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, 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 that gives 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 that lets businesses create convenient customer conversations at scale by connecting processes, event data and custom logic. 
• Analytics to provide smarter sales and service to help businesses turn conversations into revenue with data-driven insights. Custom reporting capabilities allow teams to manage high volumes and analyse historical trends to provide better staffing on the channels customers and prospects communicate on. 
• Conversational channels in Zendesk Sell, starting with WhatsApp*, that 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, centralised to provide the best consistent, quality experiences to all our customers on any channel they prefer," says Orlando Gadea, global VP of customer experience transformation, Stanley Black and Decker.

"We are there for our customers when and where they need us and truly value building connections with our end users."

Better support for Meaningful Employee Experiences
As businesses embrace hybrid work environments that blend remote and in-office work, employees have new needs and expectations. Personalised, data-driven service in a timely manner isn't just for customers. Employee support teams also need an efficient, easy way to transform the way they work with capabilities such as simplified workflows and automation.

Zendesk's employee experience offering builds on over 15 years of providing the best customer service and brings together the Zendesk Suite, with additional capabilities like integrated self service, easy to use case management and Zendesk professional services.

With this offering, Zendesk gives employee support teams:

• A single source of truth for HR, Finance, Operations, IT and other support teams who are crucial to connecting 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 in order to continually improve the employee experience. 

"Virgin Pulse serves 14 million members across 190 countries, but we believe our employees are the number one driver of members being successful in their journey and delivering our business goals," says Michael Pace, vice president of global member services, Virgin Pulse.

"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. 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. The Sunshine Platform helps companies customise Zendesk quickly using apps, tools, and pre-built capabilities that fit their systems.