Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

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

Like the perfect storm, 2020 blew in and turned business on its head. And today, business operations, offices, and even customers look quite different. According to a recent McKinsey survey, over 75 percent of customers in the U.S. have tried something new when it comes to how they shop, the services they use, or how they communicate with companies. Many of these changes are likely to stick around long after the pandemic is over.

Many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) rely on a patchwork system of multiple tools just to capture customer information and respond to requests. This can result in time wasted, missed requests and lost sales—not a great look for a growing business. What’s more, these workarounds and stopgaps simply don’t scale. As your business matures, your technology needs to mature too.

According to a recent NPR survey of state health departments, the national coronavirus contact tracing workforce tripled in just six weeks, jumping from 11,142 workers to 37,110—and public health researchers say it needs to grow even more. Recent surges in cases underscore the importance of reopening countries, states, schools, and businesses carefully and as safely as possible—when the time is right.

The world will keep changing, and now is the time to embrace it. Change can be challenging, of course, but it can also push you to build an even better customer experience, listen to your customers more closely and work harder to stand out from your competition—and these are all good things. One of the ways you can equip your team to embrace change is with a virtual sandbox environment.

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.