Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Look to the skies, or just our Apps Marketplace, to learn about all the great new integrations.

The promise of technological change in the future is ratcheting up consumer expectations with businesses. As a result, the bar for what defines quality customer service is continually raised. To respond to these ever-rising expectations, businesses require more flexibility and agility from their technology platforms than ever before.

SAN FRANCISCO – November 13, 2018 – Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today launched Sunshine, an open and flexible customer relationship management (CRM) platform built completely in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). Zendesk Sunshine enables businesses to connect and understand all their customer data, wherever it lives, and gives their developers the ability to build and deploy customer apps and services faster.

Today’s customers are moving and changing at an incredibly fast pace. They’re better connected and more informed, and they’re bringing higher expectations into their conversations with businesses as a result. It is tough for businesses to keep up with those expectations. Too often, companies are held back by proprietary technologies and old ways of thinking.

Think about how much valuable data is generated by just a handful of customer service requests. With this data, your business can learn more about why customers reach out for help—and more importantly—what your business can do to improve your customer experience.

Even in the age of email, social media, and whatever new support channel is just around the corner, customers still want the option to call a support agent. Whether it’s to resolve complex support issues or to receive personalized service, many people appreciate companies that make the investment in providing quality support over the phone.

All aboard! Here are the latest app integrations available on the Marketplace.

AI assistants are capable of quite a bit more than their living room responsibilities, although we very much appreciate that they can order us pizza and play Spotify. In the workplace, they’re helping to fill the gaps that commonly plague customer service: miscommunications, uninformed support agents, and meeting customers’ expectations. As much as machine learning has been touted for providing better customer experiences, it can help drive better customer engagement as well.

Expectations for the speed of support have skyrocketed. With literal instant messaging available between loved ones, friends, and coworkers, it’s an unsurprising evolution to expect instant responses from the companies we buy from. The number of U.S. online shoppers who use live chat has increased from 38% to 58% over the last five years.

As customers and companies become more familiar and comfortable with artificial intelligence, the conversations around it have become less “pie in the sky” and more along the lines of “oh, that’s how it can be used”. The speculations into how we might work alongside our robot coworkers and the potential of machine learning won’t end anytime soon, but there’s a lot to be said about practical applications of AI technology.