Zendesk Acquires Smooch, Announces New Integrations at Its Showcase Event
NEW YORK – Zendesk at its one-day customer experience event, Zendesk Showcase, today announced its acquisition of Smooch Technologies, providers of a platform for connecting businesses with customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences," said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk's founder, CEO, and chairman. "As long-time partners with Smooch, we know first hand how much they have advanced the conversational experience to bring together all forms of messaging and create a continuous conversation between customers and businesses."
Smooch is one of the largest providers of WhatsApp Business integration, and through Zendesk's early access program, companies can now reach WhatsApp's 1.5 billion users to manage service interactions and engage with customers directly through Zendesk Chat.
"With their launch of Sunshine last year, Zendesk took the bold and disruptive step required to compete for and win the future of CRM," said Warren Levitan, co-founder and CEO of Smooch, in a statement. "The decision to combine forces with Zendesk and help further their CRM strategy will allow us to supercharge our existing mission for building the best customer experiences. We are thrilled to be joining the entire Zendesk team, so many of whom we have had the pleasure to work with over the past three-and-a-half years."
Together, Zendesk and Smooch will drive the next wave of connected conversations on a variety of messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, Twitter DM, Viber, Kakao Talk, SMS text, RCS and through native web iOS and Android apps.
Zendesk also used the Showcase event to announce the general availability of Side Conversations for Slack. Side Conversations empowers companies to collaborate without leaving Zendesk. With Zendesk Sell and Support integration, service and sales teams can partner to develop joint solutions with full customer context.
Zendesk also announced expansion of its Zendesk Marketplace with the addition of Atlassian Statuspage, Lessonly, Maestro, Stella, Tymeshift, Geckoboard, and Ada.
The company also announced an expansion of Zendesk Sunshine, its open and flexible CRM platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These expansions include new partnerships and integrations to connect siloed data and deliver deep customer insight.
"Launching the open, flexible, CRM platform Sunshine marked a significant milestone for us as we help companies get a deeper and more holistic view of their customers," said Adrian McDermott, president of products at Zendesk. "Our new partnerships enable companies to build and deploy apps faster with Sunshine. This flexibility is key to creating experiences that customers want today."
Among these new partners is ClearScale, Domo, Narvar, Qualtrics, Atlassian Opsgenie, Vidyard, PagerDuty, Zaius, Moltin, Particular, CloudSet, Envoy, and Magento. These partners join companies such as Pendo, Segment, Stella Connect, and Oomnitza that already build on Sunshine.