Introducing The Zendesk Suite

Editor’s note: This blog post is a little old. For the most up to date info, read our article All new Suite, radically simple

Customer service is as simple and complicated as answering the call when a customer reaches out to your business with a need, desire, question, or problem.

That’s the hope, anyway—but it’s not always the reality. Customers reach out across all available communication channels and typically meet a variety of responses in return: having to identify and explain themselves more than once, waiting patiently for troubleshooting steps that don’t work, and sometimes there’s no response at all.

That’s probably not because the business wants it to be this way. More likely, you’re facing limitations in technology and manpower and are doing the best you can, especially given the multitude of systems you’re already using to serve customers. Even so, that’s not the best customer experience. As Sean Garety, the user experience lead at The Home Depot, has been widely quoted as saying: “The technology you use impresses no one. The experience you create with it is everything.”

As humans, the experience of being seen and heard goes a long way. And when it comes to customer service, companies have to heed the customer call and respond.

Welcome to the Experience Economy

We’ve actually been here for quite some time. As the Harvard Business Review explained ten years ago, “From now on, leading-edge companies—whether they sell to consumers or businesses—will find that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences.”

Take any food delivery service; the speed, ease, and overall convenience typically matters more than the food itself. It has to be good, of course, but when you’re hungry and short on time (or maybe just unwilling to change out of your sweatpants), you’re going to choose the service that delivers the food warm and fast—the one that gives you exactly the experience you desire. Positive experiences with your business may involve your product or service, but the product or service alone can’t compete against another brand’s experience-led offering.

Customers have shown over time that they like having options for contacting a business—sometimes to self-serve, other times to reach a human—but they don’t appreciate experiences that exist in a vacuum. Instead, they value being able to pick up with a business where they left off, and appreciate when a business recognizes that it’s dealt with them before.

Meet our bundle of joy

Zendesk is proud to announce our newest arrival—The Zendesk Suite. The Suite, as we call it for short, bundles Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk into a single omnichannel solution that’s easy to try, buy, and set up, all at a great price.

Together, The Suite connects the dots so that you can choose to open and close channels as desired, but always recognize your customer. No contacts slip through the cracks and nothing is lost in one system while you’re working tickets in another.

With The Zendesk Suite, you can:

Give customers what they want, when they want it
Original research from Zendesk found that 64 percent of customers expect real-time assistance, regardless of the channel they choose—a tough demand for lean and growing teams. As many as 87 percent of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a seamless customer service experience. This includes meeting customers on their smartphones or embedding help directly into your app. With The Suite, you have the flexibility to extend Zendesk using the API, Mobile SDK, and Web Widget, and can tap into Zendesk’s ecosystem of apps and integrations to design exactly the service experience your customers expect.

Create insight-led experiences
The Suite gives leadership visibility into cross-channel trends, ticket volume, and agent performance. With a single source of truth, admins can manage all channels from a single interface and make adjustments in real-time. This can mean using Guide to update a help article from within Support, or spotting a trend and alerting your product team about an issue that’s generating tickets. It also means being able to easily shift agents between channels as volume surges in a particular channel. When you can see what’s happening, you can take action.

Build a world-class support operation
Omnichannel customer support is important to small and large businesses alike, and size doesn’t have to matter when it comes to providing the channels your customers want. When channels are integrated into one seamless agent and admin experience, that naturally translates to a seamless customer support experience. The Suite allows you to track the history of each customer relationship and gives agents more context the next time the customer engages. This is the type of support offered by world-class support organizations and makes for happy customers. It also plants the seed for growth; the infrastructure allows you to be agile so that you can begin to transform your support organization into a proactive and revenue-driving arm of your business.

The best part is that The Suite offers a low investment to get up and running. Turn it on right out of the box, and scale or extend and customize your experience as you grow.

We’ve got options: Learn more about The Suite, kick the tires before hitting the road, or contact us to learn more about building your own omnichannel solution.