What makes Zendesk champions of customer service

Everyone knows customer service is important. Or at least everyone should know. Because we are all customers. And customer service is everywhere.

Some customer experiences are obvious. You’re probably thinking about them now. For example, the way the clerk treats you in a store, or a company’s generous return policy.

But really, any interaction you have with any company or organization is, at its core, a customer service experience: a call to the bank, a visit to the hospital, a trip on the train. Or these days it could even be a conversation with an AI-powered chatbot about a ride you took on an app-based car service.

If you have ever bought something from anywhere, hired someone to do something, or talked to any business about anything, you are a customer. The quality of these customer experiences affects your life.

Yes, that sounds dramatic—but it’s true. A great customer experience can make your day. In part, this is true because a good customer experience shows that time and energy have been put into making things easy and enjoyable for you.

But also, it’s true because the opposite is true. Think about the last time you had a frustrating or annoyingly complex interaction with a business. It probably stressed you out, pissed you off, or maybe even ruined your day.

Zendesk wants to help fix that. Technically speaking, we do this with our customer service software, supporting services, and industry-defining thought leadership. But that’s a lot. More simply put, Zendesk connects companies to customers so that they can solve problems in many different ways.

Making that happen is complicated—especially for bigger companies. In order to provide good customer service, a lot of things have to work together:

1. It needs to be easy for the customer

   Companies today are expected to provide customer support wherever and however it’s convenient for their customers. That can be through emails, texts, messaging, chatbots on your website, or investing in self-service so that customers can solve their own problems… the list goes on.

2. Teams have to be set up for success

   Agents, admins, and internal teams can only do their best work if they’re using the right tools—and those tools have to be powerful, quick to set-up, and easy to use.

3. The business has to be in sync

   That means there’s a unified view of the customer, fancy analytics to track everything, and workflows that make it easy to automate and optimize the experience.

Zendesk does all of these things, and we’re pretty good at what we do. But we also advocate for the people using our products (“champions” has two meanings—get it?).

We’re always thinking about the customer service agents, the enterprise support departments, the small businesses that do it all themselves.

We design our software with each of them in mind, and we provide the guidance and support they need to build support organizations that are most helpful to their customers.

That’s why, when people ask about us, we like to say, “We’re Zendesk. But you can also call us Champions of customer service.”