Zendesk enhances conversational experiences with proactive messages

New features offer customer experience (CX) teams more timely and personalized conversations with customers, helping to increase loyalty and generate revenue

Messaging platform also now HIPAA-enabled, with all messaging capabilities included in core Suite product

In challenging economic environments, customer engagement is top of mind for leaders who are empowering customer-facing teams to continually raise the service bar. According to the 2023 Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 77% of business leaders recognize that deeper personalization leads to increased customer retention. This underscores the need for brands to continually seek ways to tailor their CX across the entire support and purchasing journey.

Today, Zendesk announced the upcoming release of proactive messages*, designed to help brands reach out to customers with more meaningful, contextual, timely and personalized interactions on modern messaging channels. These enable businesses to:

• Provide proactive support, such as offering automated self-service based on user behavior and interaction history, as well as show delays on product delivery and scheduled maintenance;
• Drive customer engagement, acquisition and retention with custom greetings, guided onboarding and announcements; and
• Increase sales and conversion rates with targeted messages based on user events and past interactions.

“By having an agent reach out to customers proactively to address any questions or other obstacles to purchase (or even just say hello!), we determined our Spartan customer was 60% more likely to purchase than if we did not engage with them,” said Aja Varney, Director Global Customer Engagement at Spartan Race. “I am extremely excited for this capability to be available within messaging as we switch to offering a more conversational and streamlined experience to our customers.”

Furthermore, the Zendesk CX Trends Report showed that 70% of consumers purchase more from companies that offer seamless conversational experiences. Similarly, nearly 2 out of 3 (64%) spend more with a brand when issues get resolved in the channel where they already are.

“CX leaders are balancing the cost of providing good service with the reality of high customer expectations,” said Jon Aniano, Senior Vice President of Product, CRM Applications at Zendesk. “By adopting a solution of self-service, automation and agent assistance, customers get immediate answers while agents can focus on more complex tasks. Zendesk comes pre-configured so it is easy for admins to schedule when and how often messages will be sent from an agent or bot.”

New messaging additions to the Zendesk Suite
Next month, Zendesk is also making messaging platform capabilities available to more companies by adding Sunshine Conversations** for customers using the Zendesk Suite. For example, brands can use Sunshine Conversations to build proactive messages to many customers at the same time on channels like WhatsApp and SMS — such as notifying about major service disruptions or marketing current product promotions.

“It’s time to realize the value of a proactive approach for connecting with customers and adding value to the conversation,” said Aniano. “By getting ahead of service issues before they happen, companies reduce operational costs and avoid damaging their brand reputation as customers are unafraid to call out poor CX. For example, notifications about shipment delays or recommendations for replacement products have the potential to lead to increased customer satisfaction and a measurable impact on revenue.”

Additionally, Zendesk messaging is now included in the Zendesk Business Associate Agreement as a HIPAA-enabled service. This allows Zendesk customers to meet their HIPAA obligations with the newest messaging features.

For more information, check out What’s New on March 8.

*Proactive messages is being released at the end of the month.
**Sunshine Conversations will be added to the Zendesk Suite in early April. This will be available on Professional plans and above.