Zendesk alliance with WhatsApp for better customer service experience

Zendesk marked partnership with Whatsapp and expanded capabilities that empower companies to immediately engage with customers, share information and respond to questions across WhatsApp, and Facebook’s other messaging services on Messenger and Instagram as well.

These days messaging has become a primary way to communicate, as a result of which Zendesk customers have already shown strong demand for Facebook’s messaging channels by adding WhatsApp and/or Messenger to their support offerings.

According to insights from research by Zendesk and ESG, companies with the best customer experiences (CX) invest in offering more channels to their customers, with CX-focused organizations showing they are much more likely to have embraced messaging apps (89 percent) and social media (87 percent) than their competitors.

“Businesses today need to meet their customers where they want to be met -- and that’s increasingly through messaging. More than 175 million people already message a business account on WhatsApp every day to ask questions and get helpful information, and as more conversations shift online during the ongoing pandemic, messaging tools can help businesses of all sizes increase their efficiency and improve customer satisfaction,” said Matt Idema, Chief Operating Officer at WhatsApp.

“Through this partnership with Zendesk, we’ll help many more medium-sized businesses get started using messaging to communicate with their customers in a matter of minutes and build new features to make WhatsApp the best way to get business done.”

WhatsApp chose Zendesk as one of its first core solution providers to facilitate enhanced customer conversations and support across its messaging service.

This duo collaboration will give customers early access to new features, such as the workflows allowing businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp more quickly.

Zendesk messaging will let the businesses add out-of-the-box capabilities to their website and mobile app so customers can have rich, engaging, and automated (where preferred) conversations over WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

Messaging conversations flow into the unified agent workspace so a support team can manage and respond to customers over any channel, all from a single place, and with complete history and context of the conversation - meaning customers are less frustrated and do not have to repeat themselves.

In order to scale conversations across multiple channels, brands can automate common question and answer conversations and build AI-powered workflows powered by Answer Bot to deflect common questions and request information when it needs to be escalated to a live agent.

By using Zendesk’s self-service tools, support teams can easily create specific topics and answers within Zendesk, without needing to tap into developer resources.

Zendesk’s robust platform capabilities will let businesses connect multiple internal and external applications to build tailored messaging experiences, including: adding third-party bots for specific use cases, sending proactive notifications to customers;; connecting to their internal tools so customers can take immediate action; engaging with both customers and partners in group messages and more.

“There are significant shifts in the ways customers are choosing to interact with businesses - most notably a 50 percent surge in usage of messaging channels over the first half of 2020. We are committed to helping businesses embrace the trends that are here to stay,” said Adrian McDermott, President of Products, and Zendesk.

“The new Zendesk messaging capabilities, automated workflows and customization features are helping our customers provide conversational experiences that flow seamlessly across channels and devices while remaining engaging, personal and contextual. Our partnership with WhatsApp and Facebook, which provides Zendesk business customers access to simple API tools to connect with their customers on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, is integral to this evolution.”