Zendesk has been weathering the storm since the beginning of 2022.
After months of fallout following stockholder opposition to the company’s $4.1 billion bid for Momentive, an investor group acquired Zendesk for $10.2 billion.
Interestingly, this came only months after Zendesk turned down the $17 billion offer because of “underevaluation”.
Nevertheless, Mikkel Svane, Founder, Chairman, and CEO at Zendesk, promised a bright future. At the time, he said:
This is the start of a new chapter for Zendesk with partners that are aligned with the strength of our agile products and talented team, and are committed to providing the resources and expertise to continue our growth trajectory.
Using these resources, the Zendesk team has spent the summer focusing on many new features and collaborations.
Summer Updates
Zendesk has launched a handful of messaging and analytics features, alongside new innovations geared towards sales teams.
Yet, perhaps most interesting is its new ticket handling capabilities. Now, employees can raise tickets by messaging a handle within Slack, supporting internal helpdesk use cases and B2B conversations.
Zendesk has also simplified its mobile messaging to give users more insights into tickets. Indeed, users can now add information like device, browser, or language to collect more info for ticket handling.
Another eye-catching capability is Automated Triage – a feature that predicts the intent and language of the ticket. Powered by AI, this adds rich customer context to the helpdesk software.
Aside from the tickets’ predicted intent and language, the system also supports customer service agents to provide the next steps to customers through AI-generated next best actions.
Such innovations may highlight that Zendesk is moving closer to the CCaaS space, as many have long speculated.
In conversation with CX Today, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, referenced this. He said:
There’ve been rumors of them moving into the contact center space forever. I think that is a hard pivot to make just because they would have to actually go and buy a contact center company as it’s hard to build your own calling platform. But, certainly they could keep encroaching on that and become more customer service oriented.
It appears Zendesk is doing precisely that and becoming more service-oriented while also building out its sales portfolio.
This summer’s sales updates include advanced sales analytics and new integrations for Sell – Zendesk’s CRM.
Further features that will be available soon across its portfolio include bot interaction optimisation with tags, alongside new dashboards and datasets for Explore.
