Warren Levitan,<\/span>\u00a0are being offered positions with Zendesk. Smooch is based out of Montreal, Canada \u2014 so this represents an expansion for Zendesk into building an office in Canada.<\/p>\nIts backers included iNovia, TA Associates and Real Ventures, who collectively had backed it with less than $10 million (when you leave in inflated hills surrounding Silicon Valley, numbers magically decline). As Zendesk is publicly traded, we may get more of a picture of the price in future quarterly reports. This is the company\u2019s fifth acquisition to date.<\/p>\n
The deal underscores the big impact that messaging apps are making in customer service. While phone and internet are massive points of contact, messaging apps is one of the most-requested features Zendesk\u2019s customers are asking for, \u201cbecause they want to be where their customers are,\u201d with WhatsApp \u2014 now at 1.5 billion users \u2014 currently at the top of the pile, Wolverton said. (More than half of Zendesk\u2019s revenues are from outside the US, which speaks to why WhatsApp \u2014 which is bigger outside the US than it is in it \u2014 is a popular request.)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s partly a by-product of how popular messaging apps are full-stop, with more than 75 percent of all smartphone users having at least one messaging app in use on their devices.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences,\u201d said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder, CEO and chairman, in a statement. \u201cAs long-time partners with Smooch, we know first hand how much they have advanced the conversational experience to bring together all forms of messaging and create a continuous conversation between customers and businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the two companies were already working together, the acquisition will mean a closer integration.<\/p>\n
That will be in multiple areas. Last year, Zendesk launched a new CRM play called Sunshine, going head to head with the likes of Salesforce in helping businesses better organise and make use of customer data. Smooch will build on that strategy to bring in data to Sunshine from messaging apps and the interactions that take place on them. Also last year, Zendesk launched an omnichannel play, a platform called The Suite, which it says \u201chas become one of our most successful products ever,\u201d with a 400 percent rise in its customers taking an omnichannel approach. Smooch already forms a key part of that, and it will be even more tightly so.<\/span><\/p>\nOn the outbound side, for now, there will be two areas where Smooch will be used, Wolverton said. First will be on the basic level of giving Zendesk users the ability to see and create messaging app discussions within a dashboard where they are able to monitor and handle all customer relationship contacts: a conversation that was inititated now on, say, Twitter, can be easily moved into WhatsApp or whatever more direct channel someone wants to use.<\/p>\n
Second, Wolverton said that customer care workers can use Smooch to send on \u201cmicro apps\u201d to users to handle routine service enquiries, for example sending them links to make or change seat assignments on a flight.<\/p>\n
Over time, the plan will be to bring in more automated options into the experience, which opens the door for using more AI and potentially bots down the line.<\/p>\n
Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/OY_CT9fPpzU\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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