Zendesk today launched the Zendesk Sales Suite, giving sales teams access to a range of Zendesk tools in one product at a better price. The company also announced updates to its Support Suite for better customer service, as well as the general availability of its open CRM platform , Zendesk Sunshine. Zendesk says the new and expanded services are aimed at helping brands deliver the best possible customer experience. As Zendesk notes, IDC predicts that companies will spend $641 billion on CX technologies in 2022.
According to Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s president of products , the company’s goal is for its tools, products, and platform to deliver a unique and special experience for its customers. Service-first CRM starts with truly serving the customer without a “hard sell” approach, considers the length of time a customer might have in a way that ensures transparency and brand responsiveness, and allows customers to drive their own customer experience to some degree.
The new Sales Suite includes Zendesk Sell, Chat, Reach, and Voice. With these tools, sales reps can access multiple channels, including email, text, and voice. They can also leverage data enrichment and search tools powered by Clearbit. The Sales Suite could be useful for organizations with limited budgetsbut growing sales pipelines and a growing need for new tools. Jon Aniano, Zendesk’s vice president of product, said that it’s important to keep in mind that a large set of tools is needed to address and meet the ever-evolving and changing needs of customers. The new Sales Suite provides businesses with a wide range of capabilities. Meanwhile, Zendesk’s Support Suite now has new messaging channels to reach consumers, powered by Sunshine Conversations, Zendesk’s recently launched business platform. Now, Support Suite customers will be able to use a workspace to easily collaborate with customers on popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WeChat , and LINE.
The upgraded Support Suite workspace also provides agents with a single view of all recent customer conversations, including customer calls and emails . This can help agents streamline and shape customer interactions as well as integrate customer-related information from external data sources into the Sunshine platform.
Finally, Zendesk is introducing Sunshine, the CRM platform built entirely with open standards on Amazon Web Services, to GA. In addition to allowing businesses to connect data from any system, it gives developers access to open source tools on AWS. Additionally, as part of Zendesk’s Early Access Program, the company released new Sunshine workflow tools and other integrations in partnership with companies like Workato, Qualtrics, and Narvar.
