Photo: Zendesk
TECHNOLOGY
Zendesk Takes Customer Relations to Social Media
As digital commerce has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts have forecasted that doing business online will become even more important during the 2020 holiday season. The San Francisco–headquartered customer-relations-management company Zendesk Inc. recently announced a product that it believes will give companies a digital edge.
On Nov. 10, Zendesk announced a partnership with the WhatsApp communications service, which features cross-platform messaging. It will allow companies to communicate with their customers through WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, as well as Facebook’s other messaging services on platforms such as Instagram. Companies will be able to handle customer-service issues on more platforms where their customers spend time, said Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s president of products.
“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,” McDermott said. “We are committed to helping businesses embrace the trends that are here to stay. 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.”
Zendesk is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange with the label ZEN. On Oct. 29, the company released results for its 2020 third quarter. Third-quarter revenue was $261.9 million, an increase of 24 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year. By the end of the year, Zendesk forecasted that it will report revenues of more than $1 billion for the fiscal year.
