Incident response platform provider PagerDuty Inc. said today it’s teaming up with Salesforce.com Inc. and Zendesk Inc. to help organizations resolve customer service issues faster.

Announced at PagerDuty Summit 2019 this morning, PagerDuty for Customer Service is basically a two-way integration with Zendesk’s customer service software and Salesforce’s Service Cloud suite. It gives workers an easier way to share information about customer service issues such as a broken shopping cart and work together to resolve them.

The new service is a natural extension of PagerDuty’s information technology incident management platform, which is used to create real-time workflows that alert software developers and engineers when something goes wrong with their applications.

Being able to receive alerts in real time is the key point here, since PagerDuty points to research that shows it takes an average of 80 minutes for an organization to mobilize a response team to fix service outages. The main reason it takes so long for companies to respond is that their IT teams often work in silos, using different applications, and have no easy way to share information.

That’s not good enough for the 80% of consumers who say they’ll stop doing business with a company because of a poor experience. Users increasingly demand that companies can fix issues immediately and will happily vote with their feet if those companies can’t do so.

“PagerDuty’s two-way integration with Zendesk solves a significant problem in customer service: information siloed between teams working in different systems,” said Luke Behnke,  Zendesk’s vice president of product. “When teams are able to share information and collaborate, customers get resolutions faster. With this solution, technical teams can see specific context from customer conversations within PagerDuty, such as whether it’s an isolated or widespread issue, without sifting through call logs and emails.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said it was good to see PagerDuty expanding its traditional IT support and monitoring services to help out with customer service issues.

“These unique cross-channel messaging capabilities will make sure they reach the right people at the right time,” Mueller said. “This is a good example of a modern next-generation application that’s changing the future of work.”

Image: PagerDuty