Zendesk Inc. makes support, sales and customer engagement software for businesses. And it has created a unique partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., having moved all of its services to the cloud.

“They’re our sole provider, and we’ve run all of our services with AWS,” said Shawna Wolverton (pictured), executive vice president of product at Zendesk. “There’s a fantastic relationship that we have where we’re able to deliver not just our basic services, but to really take advantage of the services that Amazon and AWS provide so that we can accelerate our own roadmap and really deliver great features to our customers.”

Wolverton spoke with Justin Warren, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how Zendesk and Amazon have partnered together and the future of the phone. (* Disclosure below.)

Using the phone, messaging to connect and communicate

Zendesk has been famous for its customer-centric attitude. And no matter how technically advanced humans continue to get when it comes to communication, there’s still nothing quite like the phone when connecting to customers, according to Wolverton.

“The rumors of the call center and the telephone as a channel — their demise has been greatly exaggerated,” Wolverton said. “For as much as we’re all excited about chatting and messaging and all of the different ways that we can connect with our customers, there’s something about having a phone number and allowing people to pick up the phone and talk to a human that refuses to go out of style.”

This is why Zendesk’s partnership with AWS and other services like Amazon Connect, an omnichannel cloud contact center, has been hugely powerful, according to Wolverton.

“Recently, when a lot of this sort of acceleration has picked up [due to COVID-19] … we saw a customer who had … a kind of massive failure of their own phone system be able to come to us, get up and running incredibly quickly, and start taking thousands of calls a day,” Wolverton described. “And so that … fast-start ability for our customers is just hugely important.”

However, that’s not to say that texting and other forms of messaging aren’t extremely important when it comes to customer service, and more and more customers are interested in using texting and other messaging forms as a way to communicate.

“More and more we’re seeing the rise of messaging as a channel, both through the social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as native messaging,” Wolverton said. “All of this to businesses is a huge way to engage.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Zendesk Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Zendesk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE