UPDATED 15:30 EDT / OCTOBER 30 2019

BIG DATA

Zendesk and PagerDuty get the whole company playing on CX team

To a customer, a great user experience is, well, kind of boring most of the time. There are no surprises except for occasional pleasant ones — like discount offers. To companies making it happen, it’s a hot and breathy team sport played by developers, engineers, support agents, and sales teams. To enable them, many are carrying extra weight in software and are looking to slim down without losing insights.

“Most companies we talk to have hundreds of different systems that store a little bit of information about the customer,” said Luke Behnke (pictured), vice president of product — platform and core services — at Zendesk Inc.

Consider the customer relations management system. Many companies rely on these for customer insights. But they don’t always provide the timely, actionable information that today’s companies need to retain savvy customers.

Behnke spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco. They discussed how ZenDesk’s integration with PagerDuty enables all-around better CX (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Not your daddy’s CRM(s)

“I talked to a customer recently that said, ‘I have 12 CRMs — are you going to be my 13th?'” Behenke said.

The answer is no; what Zendesk wants is to bring the right bits of information into a single platform to allow users to take actions on behalf of customers. These could be routing them to the right agent, arranging for a sales rep to reach out to VIP customers, or springing up a chat bot that solves customers’ pain points based on his or her data.

Zendesk’s new Sunshine platform, while technically a CRM, is open and flexible enough to take in tons of customer information. This is what enables users to make intelligent, holistic decisions that prevent and fix customer issues.

The real magic for companies comes via Zendesk’s integration with PagerDuty Inc.’s platform — the incident-response platform for IT departments. Bringing the incident-management portal together with customer records and communication puts support tickets into a richer, customer-centric context. Customer-support agents and engineers have access to the same information in near real time. They can proactively update customers on potential problems. The info is also available to sales reps so they can adjust their approach in light of issues that come up.

“Customer support, product, DevOps and engineering can kind of work together to deliver a better customer experience,” Behnke concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PagerDuty Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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