Messaging platforms for brighter conversations with customers
Zendesk Sunshine Conversations is an API-based platform that lets businesses use social media and messaging services to communicate directly with their customers, letting you unify messages from every channel into a single conversation.
It facilitates a smooth customer experience, connecting brands to customers, by allowing companies to build real interactive messaging experiences anywhere. So businesses can use Sunshine Conversations to interact with customers across basically all popular messenger services: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, Twitter DM, Viber, Kakao Talk, SMS text, RCS and through native web iOS and Android apps.
This tool comes as a time when messaging services and social channels are increasingly used and are becoming a must in any customer service within Retail, Travel, Insurance or FinTech.
As per Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s president of products said: “What we’re seeing around the world — and it’s fair to say the future is here, but it’s unevenly distributed around the globe — is this shift toward conversational means of doing business”. Adding that: “It used to be your website… was the anchoring experience that you had with your customers”
The reality is that customers are adapting quickly to this type of interaction with their brands, responses must be quick and through many channels. Therefore the challenge for companies is to be able to find the right tool and build customer relationships in a conversational manner.
The new Sunshine Conversations was launched nearly a year ago and is part of Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform and it is built completely on Amazon Web Services, allowing businesses to integrate bots and AI services into conversations, sharing conversational data across the organisation, ensuring sales, service and marketing teams all have the same context for customer service. And it has got the ability to message customers on their preferred channel and in their preferred language, meeting global requirements and providing a truly personalised service that is safe and secure.
In summary, Sunshine Conversations allows businesses to elevate their communication beyond texting to engage with customers, including:
- Integrating bots and AI services to deliver personalised interactions and seamlessly hand-off conversations between bots and humans.
- Building rich, interactive conversational experiences like browsing products, booking reservations and making payments directly within the messaging interface.
- Sharing conversational data across the business so everyone has complete customer context to serve customers better.
This platform grew out of Smooch, a Montreal-based startup that joined the Zendesk family in May 2019. Smooch’s mission was to humanise the relationship between businesses and customers, so you can see why Smooch + Zendesk was a match made in heaven. These two companies both shared the vision of “Messaging as the future of business-to-customer engagement because it’s rich, familiar, and fundamentally more human than traditional methods of communication”.
Messaging platforms are here to stay and evolve even more because these can empower businesses to have more personal conversations with their customers by giving every team involved in the customer relationship, the same view of the ongoing conversation and the ability to engage with customers on any channel.
About redk
redk has over 15 years’ experience as technical and consultancy CRM and CX experts. We aim to support companies seeking to enhance efficiency and profitability through world-class tools that optimise team performance across your organisation. If you are interested in getting to know better what Sunshine Conversations can do for your company, contact us now.
