Zendesk bundles customer support services as cloud contact center

Zendesk has bundled its customer support products into an omnichannel cloud contact center. The vendor also announced the availability this week of Zendesk Connect, an automated platform for proactively reaching out to customers about potential problems.

The cloud-based Zendesk Suite includes voice, email, chat, social media and self-service help desk contact channels. The unified suite will simplify the back-end interface for customer service agents and help customers switch from one channel to another, without having to start from scratch, the vendor said.

That move will bring Zendesk into more direct competition with traditional contact center vendors, even as the customer relationship management (CRM) vendor -- best known for its help desk platform -- continues to coexist with those same vendors inside many organizations.

"A lot of businesses are interested in having a single provider that covers their entire customer experience and having that tightly integrated," said Adrian McDermott, president of products at Zendesk, based in San Francisco. "At the same time, some people have large-scale investments in telephony that they don't want to depreciate too rapidly, and we respect that."

Zendesk Connect, which integrates with the vendor's help desk product, allows businesses to contact customers before those customers contact them. It could be used, for example, to automatically warn customers that a flight might be delayed or their bank account is almost overdrawn. 

Zendesk first released a preview of a product called Zendesk Connect in fall 2016. Last year, the vendor acquired Outbound.io and said it improved upon that startup's software to build the Zendesk Connect platform that was released this week.