Zendesk Introduces Workflow and Collaboration Tools to Help Enterprises Deliver Better Customer Experience at Scale

Zendesk launched new collaboration and workflow tools designed to help large companies respond to customer needs quickly and easily.

Historically, large companies have been hampered by cumbersome and complicated systems for managing their inbound customer service requests, resulting in slower responses and a messy, disjointed customer experience.

Technological advances have been rapidly changing the way people interact with businesses, and consumers increasingly expect faster, frictionless customer service from every company and industry. Zendesk helps enterprises of all sizes manage this transformation.

The new tools introduced today include Side Conversations, which enables customer service agents to collaborate with anyone, internal or external, to resolve customer issues. Additionally, Zendesk launched Skills-based Routing and Contextual Workspaces, which automatically direct each request to the right agent and then update that agent’s view to give the most relevant information based on the nature of the request.

These enhancements help Zendesk’s enterprise customers be more agile and responsive, empowering them to deliver the best possible experience for millions of customers, despite large, diverse, and geographically distributed teams.

"Zendesk has helped us solve a number of challenges facing our business and meant we now have the tools in place to work more collaboratively,” said Ioannis Savvidis, head of global hotelier care and advertiser operations at Trivago. “It's our mission to help travellers find their ideal hotel - but to do this we need to ensure our customers in the hotel industry are fully supported by us and that we provide more than just a product for them to advertise their business.

Zendesk has helped us ensure our sales and hotelier support teams can work better cross-functionally so that our customers have a seamless experience and have also helped us ensure we resolve customer queries as quickly as possible. In addition to this, we are now able to pull up insights that help us measure against our KPIs and provide more tailored guidance to the hoteliers who are using our product, empowering them to get things done quicker. The recent analysis showed over 80 per cent of our customers are happy with the service we provide."

“Customers have the same high expectations for every company they do business with -- regardless of the company size or industry," said Mikkel Svane, CEO, founder, Zendesk. "This creates unique challenges for large companies that often have many different types of customers and global teams that struggle with legacy systems. These businesses need the kinds of tools that Zendesk is introducing today to give them the flexibility and agility to do what they say they are going to do.”

More About the New Enterprise Collaboration and Workflow Tools

Side Conversations is a unique Zendesk offering that allows customer service agents to work seamlessly with people in other departments or partners outside the company to resolve customer issues. The agent can start conversations from within a ticket that collaborators can respond to over email without needing to access Zendesk directly.

In parallel, Zendesk tracks the exchange within the ticket so that the agent can manage multiple conversations at once and have a permanent record of the exchange. Side Conversations is available in the Collaboration add-on to the Zendesk Support Enterprise plan.

With Skills-based Routing, Zendesk automatically directs requests to the right agent, making it easier to manage a high volume of requests from geographically dispersed customers. With Contextual Workspaces, Zendesk automatically re-configures the agent’s workspace based on the nature of the request in order to give agents the right tools at the right time, reduce the administrative burden and help businesses resolve requests faster for millions of customers. Skills-based Routing and Contextual Workspaces are now available to customers in the early access program.

Large, complex organizations also need to streamline internal collaboration using tools that all employees, not just those in customer service, use. For example, the recently announced Zendesk App for Slack enables anyone in an organization working in Slack to use Actions to be alerted about new and updated Zendesk tickets and to create and comment on tickets directly from Slack.

More About Zendesk’s Enterprise Offerings

Zendesk offers a comprehensive set of products to help businesses of all sizes meet changing consumer expectations, maintain a competitive edge, and drive business growth.

In addition to enhancing its flagship Zendesk Support Enterprise product today, the company recently launched Guide Enterprise, which uses AI-powered Content Cues to help agents identify knowledge gaps in customer service content and collaborate more easily across extended teams. Guide Enterprise was Zendesk’s third product launch in the past year designed specifically for larger companies, following Chat Enterprise and Talk Enterprise.

The latest enterprise enhancements also follow the launch last month of The Zendesk Suite, a new omnichannel offering that brings together the most popular customer communication channels to help companies provide a consistent and connected customer experience.

Additionally, Zendesk launched Connect last month, which enables customer service teams to send automated and timely messages based on a customer’s past actions and preferences. Companies can use Connect to help customers before they ask and to manage customer interactions across different channels.

Zendesk’s newest products and features were on display today at The Future of Customer Experience event in London, Zendesk’s 2018 European event focused on trends and best practices in the customer experience industry.