Zendesk

2024. Zendesk updated AI assistant for customers and agents



Zendesk has unveiled an updated AI voice support solution that enables helpdesk agents to engage with customers in a more personalized manner and resolve more complex issues. Customers can now communicate naturally with an adaptive AI voice agent that works 24/7 and resolves issues autonomously, escalating them to a human only when necessary. Updates include call monitoring, routing, and queue management—enabling human agents to avoid routine tasks and focus on assisting customers in complex situations. Furthermore, the AI ​​assistant will provide support agents with contextual data about the calling customer, such as their sentiment and intent, and help them quickly find answers from the knowledge base.


2022. Zendesk is acquired for $10.2B



Zendesk turned down a $17 billion acquisition in February believing it was worth more. Today it was acquired for $10.2 billion by a consortium of private equity firms, well below that original offer. But the SaaS market has shifted dramatically over the last few months, and Zendesk has been caught in the middle of it in a maelstrom of investor drama. Earlier this month, the company concluded it would stay independent, a move that caused the stock price to plunge.


2021. Zendesk acquired survey service SurveyMonkey for $4B



Zendesk, a developer of cloud helpdesk and CRM, acquired the world's most popular service for conducting customer and employee surveys - SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is very popular thanks to its free version, which is mainly limited to 10 questions per survey. Created surveys are easy to share on social networks or make accessible via a link. Responses can be exported to .xls, .pdf, .ppt, and .csv. The form can be integrated with popular programs. As for Zendesk, it was also localized in Russian quite a while ago.


2020. Zendesk’s latest tools designed to give fuller view of the customer



Two years ago Zendesk, which is widely known for its help desk software, made the move to CRM when it acquired Base. A little later that year, it announced the Sunshine platform, which customers could use to build applications on top of the Zendesk platform. It has been working to integrate the CRM tool more broadly into the platform, and today’s announcement is about giving Zendesk users a broader view of its customers. Zendesk has a great amount of data at its disposal about the customer’s likes and dislikes based on interactions with the help desk side of the house.


2018. Zendesk launched customer service app builder



Zendesk announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset. Companies can build apps on top of Sunshine, typically customer experience or customer relationship apps, and they will be hosted natively on AWS and have access to all the AWS services. And all of the applications rely on the Sunshine platform for information sharing. This approach is aimed at helping Zendesk customers build applications to take advantage of the data they are collecting inside of Zendesk as a natural byproduct of doing work with the service, but over time independent developers could begin working on the platform too.


2018. Zendesk launched customer service content management platform



Zendesk announced a new enterprise content management product specifically geared for large customer service organizations. It’s called Guide Enterprise and it’s designed to provide those larger customer service organizations with a knowledge base and a content management platform for editorial planning and review. The idea is to empower customer service reps to write up solutions to problems they encounter and build up that knowledge base as part of the natural act of doing their jobs. The reps can find their fellow employees’ notes and not have to reinvent the wheel every time, and the notes and articles they write can pass through editorial review and become part of the permanent knowledge base. When customers hit the site or app, they can access solutions to common problems before having to talk to a human. The platform also includes reminders to check the content regularly so the knowledge base stays fresh and stale content is removed.


2016. Zendesk expands beyond the help desk



Customer service app Zendesk unveiled a new product Zendesk Explore that provides analytics to measure and understand the entire customer experience. With Zendesk Explore, you get instant access to the customer analytics that matter—and the deeper understanding of your customers and business that comes with it. It's taking data from Zendesk’s myriad tools or third-party systems like customer data in Salesforce, buying history in Shopify or web analytics from Google Analytics and pulling it all together into one central place. It can deliver this information, regardless of role to get a much fuller view of the customer than you can get with bits of information trapped inside application silos.


2016. Zendesk expands beyond the help desk



Customer service app Zendesk unveiled a new product Zendesk Explore that provides analytics to measure and understand the entire customer experience. With Zendesk Explore, you get instant access to the customer analytics that matter—and the deeper understanding of your customers and business that comes with it. It's taking data from Zendesk’s myriad tools or third-party systems like customer data in Salesforce, buying history in Shopify or web analytics from Google Analytics and pulling it all together into one central place. It can deliver this information, regardless of role to get a much fuller view of the customer than you can get with bits of information trapped inside application silos.


2016. Zendesk introduced Zendesk Message



Zendesk, the leading customer support software, adds the new feature - Message - the messaging product that helps businesses engage customers on their favorite messaging platforms. The first of these messaging platforms is Facebook Messenger. Zendesk Message is easy to use and designed specifically for messaging. Since messaging interactions tend to occur in short bursts, the tool makes it easy for agents to move quickly from one conversation to the next, while keeping it easy to assign, own and resolve conversations. Agents will be able to easily reference important events in a long conversation stream with features like timeline.


2014. New Zendesk Voice raises the bar for phone support



Helpdesk service Zendesk updated its phone support feature Zendesk Voice. The new version, built upon the Twilio platform, is now available in 39 countries. Leveraging Twilio’s global network of data centers, calls are delivered quickly and clearly. You can launch a call center in minutes by using built-in functionality that allows agents to make and receive calls from within the browser, or forward calls to another line. By bringing customer information, contact history and internal knowledge bases right into the agent desktop, providing phone support has never been easier.


2013. Zendesk launched new self-service portal


Customer support gurus from Zendesk have come to the conclusion (from their own experience) that most customers prefer to use self-service tools and quickly find the answer to their questions, rather than email/call support. That's why they developed (as they say) the world's best self-service portal Zendesk Help Center. It combines support forums (customer community), knowledge base and customer spaces, where they can send private or public requests. It supports mobile access (both for clients and tech support staff) and provides integration with social networks Facebook and Twitter. And the coolest feature of the new tool is the template editor that allows you to "seamlessly" integrate self-service portal in your website. You can choose a template from the library and edit it at the HTML level.