SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE:ZEN) today announced general availability of Advanced Voice, a significantly enhanced version of its phone support offering, embedded directly into Zendesk’s cloud-based contact center.
Companies can set up Zendesk phone support in minutes without purchasing any extra equipment, and can make or take calls from the same multichannel environment in which they manage all other support channels. Advanced Voice is available for all Zendesk customers to trial for free at www.zendesk.com/voice.
While companies can resolve many customer service interactions via other channels, they often need to ‘talk it out’ when it comes to issues like closing an account, booking a multi-city set of flights, or explaining a smart meter bill. As voice increasingly becomes an escalation channel for more complex customer service interactions, the ability for organizations to seamlessly add affordable phone support right alongside other support channels creates an opportunity to build positive customer relationships. This is very difficult to do with "siloed" solutions for each channel.
Recent findings from Forrester confirm, “Consumers are increasingly impatient and want quick answers to their questions. They use self-service channels as a first point-of-contact and escalate the more complex questions to live agents. This means that live agent interactions are increasingly important in building customer relationships.” (Forrester, Contact Centers Must Go Digital Or Die, April 2015)
“Our customers were keen to offer the Zendesk experience across all their support channels, including the ability to escalate the more complex questions to live agents for a human conversation,” said Matt Price, SVP, Emerging Businesses and Corporate Marketing at Zendesk. “With Advanced Voice we make a next generation customer engagement center much more accessible for a wide range of businesses.”
“Voice was so simple to set-up. We flipped a switch and instantly had a reliable, fully-integrated phone support solution that works with all our other support channels in Zendesk,” said Juan Dulanto, COO of Washio, an on-demand dry-cleaning and laundry service with operations in five major metropolitan areas in the US. “The omnichannel integration Zendesk offers is especially important as we make business decisions. The comprehensive data analytics reports we receive across all our channels provides important insights we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Zendesk’s new Advanced Voice offering includes multi-level interactive voice response to route customers to the right agent or department and provide recorded responses for frequently asked questions. In addition, warm transfer technology allows agents to ensure smooth handoffs, limit repetitive conversations and speed up resolve time. Additional features include:
- Real-time dashboards that allow managers to monitor and adapt to queue and agent activity
- Call data in Zendesk Insights to track and measure operational efficiencies and understand how phone support fits into overall support strategies
- Customizable auto-agent wrap-up time to provide agents an opportunity to complete work related to a conversation without interruption from new calls
- Multiple Schedules feature enables global businesses to assign specific business hours to individual phone numbers to accommodate complex worldwide operating hours
Please contact sales@zendesk.com or visit www.zendesk.com/voice for more information.
To celebrate the launch of Advanced Voice, Zendesk commissioned the production of three instrumental hold music tracks and will let the community vote on their favorite (through December 20, 2015). The top vote-getter will be professionally recorded, mixed, mastered, and made available for free download for any business to use as its own hold music.
About Zendesk
Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 64,000 paid customer accounts, Zendesk’s products are used by organizations in 150 countries and territories to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. Learn more at www.zendesk.com
Source: Zendesk, Inc.
