Zendesk Launches Side Conversations, Skills-Based Routing, and Contextual Workspaces

Zendesk today launched new collaboration and workflow tools designed to help large companies respond to customer needs.

The new tools introduced today include Side Conversations, which enables customer service agents to collaborate with anyone, internal or external, to resolve customer issues. Additionally, Zendesk launched Skills-based Routing and Contextual Workspaces, which automatically direct each request to the right agent and then update that agent's view to give the most relevant information based on the nature of the request.

"Customers have the same high expectations for every company they do business with, regardless of the company size or industry," said Mikkel Svane, CEO and founder of Zendesk, in a statement. "This creates unique challenges for large companies that often have many different types of customers and global teams that struggle with legacy systems. These businesses need the kinds of tools that Zendesk is introducing today to give them the flexibility and agility to do what they say they are going to do."

Side Conversations allows customer service agents to work seamlessly with people in other departments or partners outside the company to resolve customer issues. The agent can start conversations from within a ticket that collaborators can respond to over email without needing to access Zendesk directly. In parallel, Zendesk tracks the exchange within the ticket so that the agent can manage multiple conversations at once and have a permanent record of the exchange. Side Conversations is available in the Collaboration add-on to the Zendesk Support Enterprise plan.

With Skills-based Routing, Zendesk automatically directs requests to the right agent, helping users manage a high volume of requests from geographically dispersed customers. With Contextual Workspaces, Zendesk automatically re-configures the agent's workspace based on the nature of the requests. Skills-based Routing and Contextual Workspaces are now available to customers in the early access program.

---