Zendesk Announces Expansion to Zendesk Sunshine and More…
Zendesk Announces New Partnerships and Integrations for Sunshine CRM Platform
The expansion gives companies the ability to provide powerful, personalized experiences for their customers
NEW YORK – May 22, 2019 – Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced expansion to Zendesk Sunshine, its open and flexible CRM platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These expansions include new partnerships and integrations that will make it easier to connect siloed data and deliver deep customer insight to advance proactive customer experiences.
Zendesk also announced it acquired Smooch, a platform connecting businesses with customers to power more personalized and human conversations. The acquisition marks Zendesk’s next step in delivering the best omnichannel experiences by connecting conversations between businesses and customers on any messaging channel–from websites and mobile apps to the world’s leading messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
With Sunshine, businesses are able to connect and understand all customer data, wherever it lives, to build the best customer experiences. Sunshine is built for developers entirely on open standards with the security, scalability, and reliability of AWS at its core. With new integrations from companies including Narvar and Domo, Sunshine will begin offering new, powerful capabilities with tailored offerings across industries such as manufacturing and retail.
“Launching the open, flexible, CRM platform Sunshine, marked a significant milestone for us as we help companies get a deeper and more holistic view of their customers,” said Adrian McDermott, president of products, Zendesk. “Our new partnerships enable companies to build and deploy apps faster with Sunshine. This flexibility is key to creating experiences that customers want today.”
System integrators deliver on scale and operational efficiency
As mid to large-size enterprises embark on digital transformation journeys, they often look to trusted IT advisors and integration partners to identify and understand new technologies that will help them not only scale, but also realize operational efficiencies. Zendesk is working with a range of system integrators (SIs) to help companies design, build and deploy Sunshine within complex cloud architectures.
A prime example is ClearScale, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, committed to building a Zendesk practice and leveraging its talented team of engineers and developers to deploy Sunshine solutions.
“Our partnership with Zendesk to broaden the capabilities of the Sunshine CRM platform is a perfect fit,” said Pavel Pragin, CEO of ClearScale. “Our expertise as an Amazon Web Services Premier Partner combined with Zendesk’s decision to tightly integrate Sunshine with AWS gives Zendesk customers virtually endless integration possibilities. This strategic partnership increases the ability for Zendesk to efficiently solve new complex issues with their customers and offer even more native features in the Sunshine ecosystem. We are delighted to be contributing to such a well-designed platform.”
Partner program advances Sunshine adoption across industries
Zendesk’s technology alliances program and system integration partnerships provide tailored offerings to meet the needs of its customer base across critical verticals and use cases, including e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, IoT, and incident management. With Sunshine, customers can get up and running faster with fewer developer resources. These partnerships allow customers to leverage open APIs and create best of breed solutions with the ability to easily integrate other applications versus being locked into a closed system.
Additional partners including Qualtrics, Atlassian Opsgenie, Vidyard, PagerDuty, Zaius, Moltin, Particular, CloudSet, Envoy, and Magento (an Adobe company) are committed to building Sunshine integrations in collaboration with Zendesk in the near future. These partners will join companies such as Pendo, Segment, Stella Connect, and Oomnitza, that currently build on Sunshine.
Narvar, a software company delivering post purchase experiences for retailers around the world, can help companies holistically manage customer experiences within Zendesk by connecting data about order details, shipment status and returns, as well as proactively address customer requests, decreasing response time and improving customer trust.
“We’re always looking for ways to drive operational efficiencies for commerce companies in service of simplifying the customer experience, whether on our own platform or through partnerships across the ecosystem,” said Amit Sharma, Founder & CEO, Narvar. “We know customer service is a critical piece of that experience, and integrating with Zendesk Sunshine helps meet the needs of both support teams and the consumers they serve.”
“This integration with Narvar and Zendesk Sunshine will allow our teams to better engage with our customers by having more visibility into each customer’s experience,” said Joe Megibow, CEO, Purple. “We strive to put our customers at the center of all we do, and are thrilled to continue to find new solutions that enable world-class service across the touchpoints in their journey.”
Domo, a cloud-based operating system that allows entire businesses to be run through phones, partners with Zendesk and AWS to enable companies to manage their IoT solutions in more impactful and proactive ways. End users receive a better, proactive service experience, and companies are able to reduce the cost of service.
“The beauty of connecting the Domo IoT cloud with AWS IoT Core and Zendesk Sunshine is the ability to receive real-time alerts coming in from devices anywhere across the world. Through this network of end-to-end data and device management, the Domo platform enables customer insight into individual connected devices, while dramatically reducing the time to resolve issues,” said Jay Heglar, Chief Strategy Officer at Domo. “For example, SharkNinja’s robot cleaning systems individually report back data and any issue that arises immediately alerts the AWS IoT Core and Sunshine systems to proactively create a fix request.”
The combination of these new partnerships and integrations for Sunshine will allow companies to easily anticipate customer needs and better engage with them throughout their experience. This Sunshine expansion was unveiled at the one-day customer experience event, Zendesk Showcase, taking place in New York today.
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Zendesk Unveils Next Generation of Conversational Messaging Experiences
Company acquires Smooch to expand Zendesk’s omnichannel leadership; launches new WhatsApp and Slack integrations
NEW YORK – May 22, 2019 – Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced it acquired Smooch Technologies Holdings ULC, the Montreal-based company behind Smooch, a platform connecting businesses with customers to power more personalized and human conversations. The acquisition marks Zendesk’s next step in delivering the best omnichannel experiences by connecting conversations between businesses and customers on any messaging channel–from websites and mobile apps to the world’s leading messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
“We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder, CEO and chairman. “As long-time partners with Smooch, we know first hand how much they have advanced the conversational experience to bring together all forms of messaging and create a continuous conversation between customers and businesses.”
More than 75 percent* of all smartphone users now use messaging apps such as WhatsApp. Smooch is one of the largest providers of WhatsApp Business integration, and through Zendesk’s early access program, companies can now reach WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users to manage service interactions and engage with customers directly through Zendesk Chat. This marks the continued expansion of Zendesk’s integration with the WhatsApp Business API into The Zendesk Suite.
Create a consistent conversational experience
Businesses struggle to manage the rapidly increasing number of customer inquiries across a variety of disparate channels. Smooch is the only messaging solution pulling in all customer conversations across web, mobile, and social messaging into a cohesive interface no matter what the channel is. As an API and SDK-based development platform built on AWS, this acquisition furthers Zendesk’s commitment to an open, flexible CRM that businesses can harness to build and offer differentiated customer experiences.
“With their launch of Sunshine last year, Zendesk took the bold and disruptive step required to compete for and win the future of CRM,” said Warren Levitan, co-founder and CEO of Smooch “The decision to combine forces with Zendesk and help further their CRM strategy will allow us to supercharge our existing mission for building the best customer experiences. We are thrilled to be joining the entire Zendesk team, so many of whom we have had the pleasure to work with over the past three-and-a-half years.”
Together, Zendesk and Smooch will drive the next wave of connected conversations on a variety of messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, Twitter DM, Viber, Kakao Talk, SMS text, RCS and through native web iOS and Android apps. For example, with these expanded capabilities, an online retailer could seamlessly manage an issue with an incorrect shipment or return that starts on social messaging like WhatsApp and shifts to its own native messaging experience in one continuous, informed thread within Zendesk.
In addition to product enhancements, Zendesk announced a Conversation Solutions Team, which will support businesses seeking to leverage Smooch’s best-in-class conversation platform to craft personalized messaging experiences. This team can deliver customized messaging applications such as a global hotel brand that provides customers with a premium, omnichannel guest experience through the ability to message hotel staff on property in real-time for any needs across a range of messaging platforms.
Empower a collaborative, cross-functional team
Businesses know that the need to connect and collaborate in real-time is critical, and Slack is the preferred communications channel for business. To provide the best experience and service, customer-facing employees need the ability to pull in subject matter experts quickly and easily. Zendesk today announced the general availability of Side Conversations for Slack. Side Conversations empowers teams to work seamlessly together with other departments or partners outside the company without leaving Zendesk. This is especially critical for sales and support who frequently work together to solve and prioritize customer issues. With Zendesk Sell and Support integration, service and sales teams can quickly partner to develop joint solutions with full customer context.
Suite expansion with new integrations
To make great customer experience accessible to everyone, Zendesk launched The Suite in 2018, and it quickly became the company’s most successful product launch ever, driving a 400 percent increase in our customers adopting omnichannel solutions. A core part of The Suite’s success is its robust and growing Zendesk Marketplace, which is expanding with the addition of new Suite Ready partners including Atlassian Statuspage, Lessonly, Maestro, Stella, Tymeshift, Geckoboard, and Ada. These integrations help businesses improve their customer experience (CX) operations in a variety of ways, including training and managing their workforce, tracking KPIs and goals, and monitoring their tickets for quality assurance.
The Smooch acquisition, WhatsApp and Slack integrations, and The Suite expansion were all unveiled at the one-day customer experience event, Zendesk Showcase, taking place in New York today.
Smooch’s messaging solutions will continue to be supported for all current customers and available directly to new customers. To find out more about our Conversation Solutions Team or to sign up for the WhatsApp EAP with Zendesk Chat, please visit www.zendesk.com/message.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
*eMarketer: Messaging App Usage Worldwide: eMarketer’s Updated Forecast, Leaderboard and Behavioral Analysis
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