Zendesk’s latest tools designed to give fuller view of the customer
Like many technology companies, Zendesk made the tough decision to cancel its Zendesk Relate customer conference this week in Miami amid Covid-19 health concerns. That doesn't mean the announcements didn't happen though, even if the conference didn't, and today the company announced a major update to its Sunshine development platform.
You may recall that the company, which is widely known for it help desk software, made the move to CRM when it acquired Base in September 2018. A little later that year, it announced the Sunshine platform, which customers could use to build applications on top of the Zendesk platform.
It has been working to integrate the CRM tool more broadly into the platform, and today's announcement is about giving Zendesk users a broader view of its customers. Zendesk has a great of data at its disposal about the customer's likes and dislikes based on interactions with the help desk side of the house, and Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane sees the two sides being interconnected. At the same time, he's embracing the idea of this all taking place in the public cloud on AWS.
"Our vision is really to have all the components, all the infrastructure, all the business logic that you need to build a customer experience, and customer relationship management applications, all on the Sunshine platform, all living natively on AWS," Svane told TechCrunch.
All of this is in the service of giving customers a better experience based on what you know about them. He said that the goal today is to retain and satisfy the customer, and the platform is designed to give them the data they need to help do that.
"In the old days, you went out and you bought a product, and that was kind of the end of the transaction. Today, through the convenience economy, through the subscription economy, it's more about your long-term engagement with a vendor," he explained.
He sees the platform helping pull all of this data together, while recognizing and acknowledging the challenges involved here. In fact, he is reluctant to call it a complete picture, calling that a false narrative other vendors are putting out.
"We do want to help our customers extract all the relevant information and to try and create a picture that is helpful across all these different channels, but we also know that the reality of it is that you have so many disparate systems right now," he said.
He sees his platform with the engagement data on one side and the customer record on the other as a good starting point for this. "I think there's a lot you can do to collect a lot of information and have an abstraction layer, and that's what we try to do with Sunshine. We want to have an abstraction layer where you start working and seeing all of this data to get insights into your customer. And I think that's much better start."