![]() ![]() ![]() The CX use case that will see the most spending in 2019 and throughout the forecast is customer care and support followed by order fulfillment and interaction management. According to IDC, customer experience has become a key point of competitive differentiation in the digital age, and enterprises are scrambling to keep up with their peers. These moves are timely, as IDC predicts that worldwide spending on customer experience technologies will be $641B by 2022. Zendesk’s recent focus has been on capturing messaging interactions like SMS, social apps and chat bots, as these are becoming preferred channels to phone and email, particularly with younger customers. Practically, this means allowing customers to communicate with an enterprise over any channel – phone, email, text, social app or web site chat – and have those conversations all available to customer experience personnel within one interface. This argument has credence as digital transformation efforts aim to provide customers with a single touchpoint within the enterprise, and not force them to distinguish between whether they have a “support” or “sales” issue.Īnother characteristic of Zendesk’s customer experience offerings is the emphasis on enabling omni-channel communications. This evolution makes sense, as customer support personnel are increasingly being encouraged to sell upgrades and adjacent products to customers. From their foothold in customer support, Zendesk moved into salesforce automation with Sell and ultimately wants to address the full lifecycle of customer relationship management (CRM) with Sunshine. Since 2018, Zendesk has been investing heavily in building out their product line to address more customer experience (CX) use cases and expand their target audience within the enterprise. This platform is positioned against what Zendesk views as “closed” competitive offerings, like those from Salesforce (CRM). Developers can build applications in the framework of their choosing and leverage common logic APIs and data storage for generic entities like user profiles, objects and events. The platform is hosted on AWS and provides connectors for data integration with most enterprise apps. Sunshine represents Zendesk’s foray into providing a holistic, open platform for building next generation customer experience applications. In addition to the launch of the two separate Suite bundles, Zendesk announced full availability and pricing for the Sunshine platform. Bundles work well for Zendesk, growing the number of customers licensing more than one product and driving incremental revenue. Bundles have the advantage for customers of providing access to multiple Zendesk products at a bulk rate, up to 35% less than the equivalent cost of licensing each product separately. The new announced changes provide two separate “Suite” bundles – Zendesk Support Suite for customer support organizations (with messaging added) and Zendesk Sales Suite for sales organizations. Duet provided bundled access to Support and Sell, Zendesk’s salesforce automation tool. Zendesk Suite included Support, Guide, Chat and Talk, the primary products utilized by a customer support organization. Previously, Zendesk offered two product bundles for customers interested in multiple products – Zendesk Suite and Duet. Non-Sunshine product changes involve bundling of multiple offerings and extended integration with messaging. Zendesk announced several additions to the core product offering and enhancements to their new CRM platform, Sunshine. While the cancellation of Relate and the evolving COVID-19 situation will impact Zendesk’s business in 2020, their strong product development motion and new offerings will expand their leadership in customer service and support their foray into customer relationship management. ![]() However, they still made a number of product announcements and held a virtual analyst event on March 4. Unfortunately, due to concerns with COVID-19, Zendesk cancelled the in-person event. After releasing strong Q4 2019 earnings results in early February, Zendesk (ZEN) promised investors some exciting product announcements at their annual customer event, Zendesk Relate, scheduled for the first week of March. ![]()
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