Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences.

As people began working remotely during this global pandemic, organizations everywhere needed to quickly deploy new solutions for supporting the higher ticket volumes coming in from a flood of customer inquiries. Demand spiked for customer service across the spectrum of financial services, retail/manufacturing, healthcare, media/entertainment, and tech sectors, leading to powerful changes as organizations needed to rapidly scale personalized responses at the enterprise level.

As with any customer support channel, there are tried-and-true ways, as well as less effective ways, to offer live chat to your customers.

While the general use of customer relationship management software (CRM) has become the industry standard, it hasn’t always been this way. Over time, as customers have come to expect a more efficient experience, companies have turned to various ad hoc solutions to manage their customer service offering. Now, it’s not enough to know just a few things about your customers.

Most companies realize that providing robust self-service options to their customers no longer falls into the “nice to have” category—yet creating and maintaining self-service that keeps up with ever-changing customer preferences and business needs can seem daunting. But as Trustpilot has discovered, making content easily accessible, improving agent efficiency, and harnessing actionable analytics can lead to the kind of self-service that drives scalability.

Uncomplicating the customer experience can be especially challenging for companies with complex ecosystems: think of buyers and sellers within marketplaces like eBay or Reverb, or the web of interconnected business owners, drivers, and customers on the receiving end of food or furniture deliveries.

It's no secret that customers prefer to be autonomous and solve their problems on their own. This has been true for a while now: 67 percent already said they rather self-serve than speak to an agent in 2013. But today, customers don’t just expect businesses to simply offer self-service.

The world has experienced some big changes recently. Just about every company is now grappling with how to set up their business for long-term success in the new normal, and it is telling that investments in customer experience will be one of the last areas targeted for cuts.

Every business owner understands the value of superior customer support. Today, improving customer satisfaction often boils down to implementing call center software. This technology can automate call routing and recordings, along with many other features. Choosing a call center solution, though, can be an overwhelming process. First, you need to decide what type of system best matches your specific business model.

Customer service agents have an important job. They are often the first (and sometimes only) voice a customer hears when contacting a company. So in many ways, a good customer service experience rides the people on staff. Does that challenge sound invigorating? If so, you might want to consider a career in customer service. But before you can solve any customer issues, you need to get the job.

The terms service desk and help desk are often used interchangeably, and it’s easy to see why. Service and help are synonyms after all, and the goal of both desks is to resolve issues and restore normality as quickly as possible. But each desk has a distinct role. Unlike a help desk, a service desk is an IT function that traditionally supports a business’s technology infrastructure. Instead of helping customers, service desks support employees.

Customers expect a lot from support teams, especially when it comes to speed. In our 2020 Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, people rated quick resolution time as the top factor in good customer experience. To meet customers’ demands for fast resolution times, agents and support reps need to adopt ticketing system best practices that drive consistent, excellent service.

Whether you’re an employee struggling to connect to the company VPN or a customer troubleshooting a product bug, there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to get help from a business when you need it. In a time-challenged world, both customers and employees expect seamless support experiences that make them feel valued. A help desk is an often-overlooked cornerstone of a great customer service experience, internal or external.

We live in a mobile-first world, and the ecosystem of applications on our phones is a testament to that. In 2019, there were 204 billion app downloads worldwide, nearly double the amount of downloads in 2016. People use apps for everything from groceries and banking to dating and gaming. Despite the fact that apps are everywhere, many companies still struggle with whether or not to create an app for their brand or product.

Zendesk is named a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. Every year, Gartner conducts a thorough analysis of service providers in the customer service and support application space. We believe the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center report provides valuable information for business leaders who seek technology solutions for interacting and engaging with their customers.

Content management and knowledge management are often used interchangeably. But distinguishing between the two is necessary for any business that wants to use both to streamline internal operations and establish consistency in their message.

The way we interact with the world around us has changed over the last decade. We use our mobile devices to shop, read the news, and connect with friends and family. So it’s more important than ever for businesses to have a strategy for mobile customer engagement. According to the Zendesk State of Messaging Report 2020, 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging tools like chatbots, machine learning, and mobile messaging by 2022, up from 15% in 2018.

Frost & Sullivan named Zendesk as a recipient of its 2020 North American Omnichannel Digital Customer Engagement Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership award. Every year, Frost & Sullivan presents Best Practices Awards to companies that inspire growth, leadership, and innovation through differentiation that is predicted to transform their industries in the near future.

In tumultuous times, you may be inclined to pull back on customer communications. After all, if you knew a friend were sick or an employee had just lost a loved one, could you be sure of the best way to reach out, or if you should reach out at all? But what are the rules if the whole world is experiencing a crisis? You may be wondering if sending a survey to your customers means bothering them at a sensitive time.

In an increasingly mobile-centric world, more and more consumers are using apps. In 2019 alone, 204 billion mobile apps were downloaded worldwide — a 45% increase from 2016. In response, companies are scrambling to serve their customers on mobile. With so many businesses hopping on this bandwagon, it’s no longer enough just to create an app. Companies also have to create an engaging, user-friendly mobile experience.

Customers live in an omnichannel world. From phone and email, to social media platforms, live chat, and messaging apps, customers expect to engage with a brand on their own terms, and in the same communication channels they use to connect with their friends and family. And once they engage with a company, customers want fast, personalized service, meaningful marketing, and smart, thoughtful recommendations.