The Zendesk ecosystem of partners is here to help

Though the world is going through some pretty dramatic changes, Zendesk and our ecosystem of partners are here to help with tools to keep your business moving forward.

Staying agile

Across the board, businesses are facing volatile shifts in support volume, as well as the types of support that need to be prioritized. According to the Zendesk Benchmark, ticket volumes on average changed by +/-10% for companies during most weeks in 2020 so far. Whether your business is seeing traffic spikes or dips, the ability to adapt quickly is key. To understand which channels or areas warrant the most focus, tools like Explore Professional let you act quickly on emerging trends seen in your customer data. In a similar vein, real-time operations platform PagerDuty aims to facilitate incident management by offering new customers six months free access for six users to help improve visibility and agility across organizations. Additionally, Pagerduty is also helping healthcare teams mobilize quickly by offering 20 free PagerDuty licenses for six months for healthcare organizations.

Keeping your teams connected

As companies transition to remote teams, collaboration is critical. Staying aligned requires integrated data and the ability to have Side Conversations, which enables agents to bring in other people from internal and external teams to collaborate on tickets without interrupting the main conversation flow within the ticket. Side Conversations are designed to keep communications flowing seamlessly across channels such as Zendesk Support, email, and Slack.

And teamwork takes work—especially when teams are remote. It takes the right products, practices, and people, all connected by mutual trust and shared understanding. Atlassian understands this and is providing free collaboration tools—from Trello collaboration boards to Confluence team workspaces—to kickstart remote teamwork.

In the face of constrained resources, businesses are looking to maintain and even optimize productivity further. Using the right tools and automations can empower teams to concentrate on what truly matters for the business. In addition to our native Answer Bot solution for self-service deflection, Zendesk also has a chatbot partner in Ada, whose intelligent automation platform reduces support volumes by up to 80%, freeing up Zendesk agents’ time to provide incredible customer satisfaction when it’s needed most. Ada’s COVID-19 relief package offers an industry leading 3-day implementation, discounted pricing, and guaranteed performance results.

Beyond AI-powered help, companies should also tap into quality assurance solutions to help boost productivity of human agents. Stella Connect, a quality and feedback management platform, is offering Zendesk customers a full implementation of their Professional Edition for 90 days. Playvox, which equips customer service teams with tools for agent motivation, performance management, and quality assurance, is giving new customers free Playvox Quality and Coaching Apps for up to 90 days. Playvox is also offering their Learning or Motivation Apps for free through the end of 2020. Likewise, MaestroQA is quality assurance and monitoring software that helps support teams improve customer satisfaction, manage remote or dispersed teams, and coach agents based on their performance. MaestroQA is offering new customers a 90-day free trial (on any package of their choosing) to manage their remote or distributed teams through quality assurance.

Employee training is critical in times like these. Lessonly is an intuitive training platform aimed to help customer service teams quickly enable agents, no matter where those agents may be working. For Zoe Kefford, Talent & Organizational Development Manager at Flywire, “having Lessonly is the only thing keeping us going right now”. In just two weeks, Flywire was able to make their entire training and onboarding remote through the Lessonly platform. Learn more about how Lessonly can help with free remote training content and best practices, as well as a 25% discount for new Lessonly accounts.

Staying connected with your customers

Resilient businesses will strive to stay engaged and be there for their customers. In the absence of in-person interactions, Zendesk remains committed to helping organizations stay connected to their customers. And with voice as a critical channel in times like these, you can quickly turn on Zendesk Talk or tap into our best-in-class integrated voice or call center partner solutions to keep the lines of communication open with your customers:

• Amazon Connect is a simple to use, cloud-based contact center that scales to support any size business and as part of the AWS Free Tier, they are offering 12 months of free Amazon Connect usage.
• Five9 has launched a FastTrack program offering 48 hour turnaround time to migrate your contact center to the cloud and support a-work-from-anywhere model. Learn more about some of their 48 hour turnaround time stories.
• NICE inContact is providing a free work-from-home module (CXone@home) for users of the NICE inContact CXone cloud customer experience platform, to maintain service continuity while employees need to work from home.
• RingCentral is offering RingCentral Office for free to empower healthcare providers, educators and nonprofits in their fight against COVID-19.

As the world around us continues to evolve, it is evident that adjusting to a new normal is not a solo endeavor. Which is why we at Zendesk want to recognize and express gratitude for the incredible support of our strong ecosystem of partners. Together, we are committed to helping our customers continue to deliver the best possible customer experiences and foster a collaborative environment for employees around the world. We are your support team and we are here to help.

More resources:

• Quick guide for transitioning to a remote workforce
• Guide to hiring and managing a virtual support team
• Ask Me Anything: Adapting to COVID-19
• Getting the most from Zendesk: A list of Zendesk tools/features that can help transition to a remote team
• The ultimate checklist to optimize your Zendesk (A partner community post by Pythia)
• Zendesk’s Benchmark Snapshot: the impact of COVID-19 on CX
• [Forbes] Free software for use during the COVID-19 crisis