Zendesk today launched a redesigned company brand and an expanded product family focused on building better customer relationships. Zendesk also introduced Zendesk Connect and Zendesk Explore, two products that create more personal connections between customers and organizations through customer intelligence and deeper analytics.
"For too long, business software has been built for businesses at the expense of customers. It's been built for department silos and separate clouds, not the seamless experience customers expect today," said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk's founder and CEO, in a statement. "We're changing that with products built for relationships first."
The new Zendesk family of products represents the company's shift from a single customer service product to a unified family of products focused on improving customer relationships.
Zendesk Explore and Zendesk Connect together turn customer data into proactive and personalized experiences for customers.
Zendesk Explore powers analytics and unifies data for all of Zendesk's products and third-party sources. It makes customer data accessible across organizations.
"Zendesk Explore is the advanced analytics engine across all of Zendesk's products that makes it quick and easy to view and analyze any data," explains Adrian McDermott, senior vice president of product development at Zendesk. "Zendesk Explore helps companies spot insights, locate opportunities, and set sail on a better course."
Zendesk Connect provides customer intelligence so businesses can reach out with relevant and helpful messages. It combines historical data with individual customer activity from websites, mobile apps, and other digital interactions. Using Zendesk Connect, businesses can guide customers through new product experiences, provide relevant information to avoid support issues, and recommend related products.
"Zendesk Connect delivers customer intelligence for proactive engagement and support so businesses can reach out to customers at the right time," McDermott says.
Together, the two new products "help businesses bring all of their customer data together and turn it into a shared view of their customers across sales, marketing, and service," McDermott says. "In other words, anyone who is customer-facing, not just support agents, can help build a relationship with that customer."
According to McDermott, the Explore and Connect products are good examples of Zendesk's push into new areas. "Zendesk's family of products helps organizations understand their customers, improve communication, and offer support where and when it's needed most," he states.
Zendesk's redesign also reflects the company's expansion beyond customer service. Called "Relationshapes," the brand represents each of Zendesk's seven products with a logo showing the interaction of two simple shapes. Symbolizing the business and the customer, these shapes have unique personalities and relationships.
While each product has a unique identity, they all fit together into a greater whole that is represented by the new Zendesk company logo. The logo is a large Z comprised of the individual shapes connecting together.
All of the products in the Zendesk family work together through a common user interface, login, and customer data platform. Along with Zendesk Explore and Zendesk Connect, the family includes Zendesk Support, a system for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets; Zendesk Help Center, a self-service destination with articles, interactive forums, and community; Zendesk Chat; Zendesk Talk call center software for phone support conversations; and Zendesk Message.
"Zendesk is focused on taking a very different approach from other business software companies by building for relationships first rather than departmental clouds," McDermott says. "Our launch marks us moving beyond being a single customer service product to a family of products built for customer relationships."
Zendesk, he adds, "was founded on the idea that customer service software didn't have to be ugly, boring, and complicated, but rather, could be beautifully simple. This is our new direction and something you will see more of from us in the future."