Zendesk has announced expanded capabilities to its service-first CRM solutions that help companies provide real-time support across messaging channels on web, social, and mobile.
A key enabler of these capabilities is a strategic partnership — among the first of its kind — with WhatsApp that empowers companies to immediately engage with customers, share information, and respond to questions across WhatsApp, and Facebook’s other messaging services on Messenger, and Instagram as well.
As customers rapidly shift to messaging as a primary way to communicate with friends, family, and businesses, over 34,000 forward-thinking Zendesk customers have already shown strong demand for Facebook’s messaging channels by adding WhatsApp and/or Messenger to their support offerings.
According to insights from research by Zendesk and ESG, companies with the best customer experiences (CX) invest in offering more channels to their customers, with (customer experiences) CX-focused organizations showing they are much more likely to have embraced messaging apps (89 percent) and social media (87 percent) than their competitors.
WhatsApp has selected Zendesk as one of its first core solution providers to facilitate enhanced customer conversations and support across its messaging service. The partnership enables companies to easily engage and quickly respond to customers through WhatsApp, and Facebook’s other messaging services on Messenger, and Instagram as well. These customer engagements can include engaging with followers, assisting with social commerce transactions, solving customer service issues, and more.
Zendesk and WhatsApp will collaborate on the most important product capabilities, giving customers early access to new features, such as the workflows allowing businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp more quickly.
Businesses will be able to add out-of-the-box Zendesk messaging capabilities to their website and mobile app so customers can have rich, engaging, and automated (where preferred) conversations over WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
In order to scale conversations across multiple channels, brands can automate common question and answer conversations and build AI-powered workflows powered by Answer Bot to deflect common questions and request information when it needs to be escalated to a live agent. Using Zendesk’s self-service tools, support teams can easily create specific topics and answers within Zendesk, without needing to tap into developer resources.
For example, a retail company can offer support on frequently asked questions such as store locations, payment options, shipping and returns. When customers visit the retailer’s website, they will be greeted by a customized bot for that company that allows them to quickly choose from a number of options in order to get an instant answer. If the question requires agent assistance, the retailer’s bot escalates the inquiry to a live messaging channel.