The Zendesk technology partner ecosystem extends the core functionality of our industry-leading CX solution across the channels employees and customers want to communicate on. Two of these, Slack and Zoom, are in the top four most used collaborative tools in the workplace (IDC). The newest updates announced during our What’s New on Nov. 9 allow agents, employees and business partners to communicate seamlessly on both channels.

“Our customers value our strong partnerships with some of the most powerful collaboration tools,” said Pascal Pettinicchio, VP of Technology Alliances, Zendesk. “These partnerships are key to helping enterprises adapt to the current customer experience landscape. The integrations in our new agent workspace allow businesses to operate in Slack and Zoom right from Zendesk and from a mobile device.”

The new workforce prefers messaging
More companies than ever are transforming to messaging-first, with employees spending the majority of their days in apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams. And it is not just for convenience – CX operations are becoming more efficient as a result of deeper integrations and agent workspaces designed around messaging and mobile-first experiences.

With Zendesk, employees can now seamlessly raise requests by simply sending a direct message to a handle, like IT-Support, right within Slack instead of hopping between Slack DMs, a myriad of workplace apps, and an email inbox to get the help they need. Bots can also integrate with Slack to automatically answer basic, repetitive questions, reducing the load on internal agents.

This creates a better, more intuitive experience for an employee without putting any burden on an internal agent, from IT or HR for instance, to be monitoring Slack at the same time they are monitoring their Zendesk instance. Slack conversations are managed in the Zendesk unified agent workspace, just like any other messaging conversation.

Turn to video and phone for complex needs
When a more in-depth conversation is needed, agents can easily turn to another employee staple (and necessity for remote workers), Zoom. With the new Zoom Meeting integration, agents can schedule and launch Zoom meetings to provide assistance without having to leave Zendesk. They can also easily make and receive Zoom Phone calls from within Zendesk. The incoming calls are automatically matched to existing users in Zendesk and saved along with key information.

This change is important so that agents can see all the context before joining a video call, saving time and eliminating the need to constantly switch between platforms to get the job done.

A workspace to support the modern workforce
In addition to these new integration updates, we also announced omnichannel routing and live agent activity reporting in the Zendesk agent workspace. These updates are an important step in supporting the evolution of work for CX teams.

With omnichannel routing, requests are automatically sent to the right agent based on their capacity, custom agent status, and conversation priority, allowing them to deliver consistently great service every time.

Live agent activity reporting allows team leads to gain insight on what agents are working on and adapt in real time. This makes it easy to act on opportunities to improve efficiency.

To find out more, watch What’s New here, check out our recent announcement about our new customer sentiment and intent functionality powered by machine learning, or read about our new mobile app experience.