Zendesk launches Sales Suite, bundling Zendesk Sell, Chat and other tools
Zendesk on Wednesday launched Zendesk Sales Suite, giving sales teams access to a series of Zendesk tools in one product at a better price. The company also announced updates to its Support Suite for customer service, as well as the general availability of its open CRM platform, Zendesk Sunshine.
All told, Zendesk says the new and expanded services are about helping brands cultivate the best customer experience possible. As Zendesk notes, IDC predicts that IDC predicts companies will spend $641 billion on CX technologies in 2022.
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"What we're trying to do with our tools, our products and our platform is build for the new era of customer experience," Adrian McDermott, Zendesk president of products, said to reporters.
"We talk about this as the service-first CRM. Service-first CRM really begins serving the customer, rather than aggressively selling to customers. It thinks about the entire lifecycle journey of the customer in a way that allows a brand to be transparent and responsive, and allows customers to drive some of the customer experience."
The new Sales Suite includes Zendesk Sell, Chat, Reach and Voice. With these tools, sales reps can access multiple channels, such as email, texting and voice. They can speak with prospects directly and convert them to leads with one interface, and they can tap into prospecting and data enrichment tools powered by Clearbit. The suite should be useful for organizations with a restrictive budget but a growing sales pipeline and a growing need for new tools.
"Our customers have really complex and conversational sales processes with customers and need a really big toolset to address customer needs," said Jon Aniano, Zendesk's VP of product. The new Suite, he said, gives businesses a wide range of capabilities with the ability to "adopt functionality as they need it."
Meanwhile, Zendesk's Support Suite now features new social messaging channels for reaching customers, powered by Sunshine Conversations, Zendesk's recently-launched conversational business platform. Now, Support Suite customers will be able to use one workspace to easily engage with customers on popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, WeChat and LINE.
The updated Support Suite workspace also gives support agents a unified view of all the latest conversations with a customer, including customer calls, emails and messages. This can help agents personalize interactions and continue the conversation on the most logical channel. Agents can also surface relevant customer information from external data sources in the Sunshine platform.
"We've been thinking a lot about... as channels change, as preferences change for both agents and users, what can we build into that workspace that helps people," McDermott said.
Meanwhile, Zendesk is bringing into GA Sunshine, the CRM platform built completely on open standards on Amazon Web Services. In addition to letting businesses 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 launched new Sunshine workflow tools and integrations with partners including Workato, Qualtrics and Narvar.