Zendesk Introduces a New Suite of Omnichannel Tools

Zendesk has recently launched The Zendesk Suite, a new suite of omnichannel tools, in a bid to improve the customer experience.

Customer service is as simple and complicated as answering the call when a customer reaches out to your business with a need, desire, question, or problem.

That’s the hope, anyway—but it’s not always the reality. Customers reach out across all available communication channels and typically meet a variety of responses in return: having to identify and explain themselves more than once, waiting patiently for troubleshooting steps that don’t work, and sometimes there’s no response at all.

That’s probably not because the business wants it to be this way. More likely, you’re facing limitations in technology and manpower and are doing the best you can, especially given the multitude of systems you’re already using to serve customers. Even so, that’s not the best customer experience.

As Sean Garety, the user experience lead at The Home Depot, has been widely quoted as saying: “The technology you use impresses no one. The experience you create with it is everything.”

As humans, the experience of being seen and heard goes a long way. And when it comes to customer service, companies have to heed the customer call and respond.

Welcome to the Experience Economy

We’ve actually been here for quite some time. As the Harvard Business Review explained ten years ago: “From now on, leading-edge companies—whether they sell to consumers or businesses—will find that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences.”

Take any food delivery service; the speed, ease, and overall convenience typically matters more than the food itself. It has to be good, of course, but when you’re hungry and short on time (or maybe just unwilling to change out of your sweatpants), you’re going to choose the service that delivers the food warm and fast—the one that gives you exactly the experience you desire.

Positive experiences with your business may involve your product or service, but the product or service alone can’t compete against another brand’s experience-led offering.

Customers have shown over time that they like having options for contacting a business—sometimes to self-serve, other times to reach a human—but they don’t appreciate experiences that exist in a vacuum. Instead, they value being able to pick up with a business where they left off, and appreciate when a business recognises that it’s dealt with them before.

The Zendesk Suite

Zendesk have announced their newest arrival—The Zendesk Suite. The Suite, as it is called for short, bundles Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk into a single omnichannel solution.

Together, The Suite allows you to open and close channels as desired, while individually recognising each customer. No contacts are lost within one system while you’re working tickets in another.

With the help of The Zendesk Suite, contact centres can:

Give customers what they want, when they want it

Original research from Zendesk found that 64 percent of customers expect real-time assistance, regardless of the channel they choose—a tough demand for lean and growing teams.

Also, as many as 87 percent of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a seamless customer service experience. This includes meeting customers on their smartphones or embedding help directly into your app.

With The Suite, you can extend Zendesk using the API, Mobile SDK, and Web Widget, and can tap into Zendesk’s ecosystem of apps and integrations to design the service experience your customers expect.

Create insight-led experiences

Having visibility into cross-channel trends, ticket volume and agent performance is useful.

With a single source  admins can use The Zendesk Suite to manage all channels from a single interface and make adjustments in real time. This can mean using Guide to update a help article from within Support, or spotting a trend and alerting your product team about an issue that’s generating tickets.

Also, it means being able to shift agents between channels as contact volumes rise in a particular channel, allowing you to quickly take action.

Build a world-class support operation

Omnichannel customer support is important to small and large businesses alike, and size doesn’t have to matter when it comes to providing the channels your customers want. When channels are integrated into one agent and admin experience, that often translates to a better customer experience.

The Suite enables you to track the history of each customer relationship and gives agents more context the next time the customer engages. This is the type of support offered by world-class support organisations and makes for happy customers.