Companies weathered unprecedented challenges in 2020—and even thrived—by using technical agility to elevate their customer service. The trend will accelerate this year. Fortunately for support leaders, there are many Zendesk integrations to help you automate, streamline, and level up your customer support.

According to Gartner, “an integrated ecosystem of functionality” is key to creating an “effortless, intelligent and holistic customer service experience.” Here we highlight seven of our favorite apps that integrate with Zendesk to supercharge customer service in 2021—and beyond.

1. Formspree: Get better customer feedback, faster

Customer feedback is invaluable. And the response rates from customer surveys prove they’re worth your time. In fact, SurveyMonkey found that two in three customers who received surveys or forms completed at least half of them. With the right questions, feedback forms can capture valuable insights about the customer journey, from sales and marketing to product usage.

But you need to do more than collect the data. You also need to be able to use it. Unfortunately, the process of sending form data to your help-desk software isn’t straightforward. Doing so via email can be an exercise in frustration, with lost metadata, unclear ticket priority, and other hassles.

Enter Formspree, a Zendesk integration app. A form back-end tool, Formspree “closes the feedback loop” by syncing customer feedback directly, integrating with Zendesk. Formspree’s plug-in automates the process, resulting in faster insights for your team and a better experience for your customer. Formspree also provides helpful tips for building better customer feedback forms, which you can customize to match your company’s branding.

Image source

2. Census: Sync your customer data

While vital, customer data is not always easily accessible. To solve this problem, the data-automation platform Census launched an integration to sync internal customer data into Zendesk. Through this app, important customer intel that is often locked away gets delivered to your agents’ fingertips—without help from an IT team.

The plug-in is designed to save you time when responding to tickets and helps route and prioritize messages. Integrating disparate customer data into Zendesk empowers agents to provide an outstanding customer experience. It also lightens their workloads.

The software company Loom saw an immediate impact after using this Zendesk integration. During COVID-19, usage of Loom’s video messaging software exploded—and, along with it, the number of support tickets. The Census plug-in connected important customer data to Zendesk, so Loom could organize tickets by customer plan. Not only did the tool rescue agents from drowning “in a sea of tickets,” but it also enhanced the company’s data infrastructure.

Image source

3. SupportLogic: Be proactive in customer support instead of reactive

Of the many available Zendesk integrations for customer support, SupportLogic is the ideal tool for teams looking to be predictive and proactive rather than just reactive in their support. The “service experience (SX)” platform uses AI and NLP technology to monitor support conversations, identify at-risk customers, and send real-time alerts to teams. Integrated with Zendesk, SupportLogic’s dashboard provides a panoramic view of each customer, from outstanding tickets to product feedback and potential upsells.

Today’s ticketing platforms focus on metadata, which fails to capture the most valuable content inside those tickets. That was the impetus for the company’s creation, says founder and CEO Krishna Raj Raja.

“We started SupportLogic to put this unstructured data front and center and extract signals to not just understand customer sentiment, but also product requests, cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and churn risk.”

SupportLogic’s intelligence app also tracks which factors are driving escalations, enabling you to choose the best preemptive corrective actions for each customer. Agents can then communicate across teams via a Slack integration to resolve escalations quickly. Thanks to improved case management, clients have reported a 40% reduction in escalations.

Image source

4. Stream: Drive customer engagement through live chat

The enterprise-grade chat platform Stream is an excellent way to elevate your support. With Stream’s in-app messaging service, which allows you to build a live-chat web app, you can increase engagement with your customers and replace time-consuming emails.

Live chat apps offer one of the biggest growth areas for customer support. According to Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, “Customers want to communicate with companies over the same familiar channels they use to talk with friends and family. Moreover, they want fast and efficient responses.” And yet, “less than 30% of companies offer self-service, live-chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots, or peer-to-peer communities.”

By integrating Stream with Zendesk, you can differentiate from competitors while optimizing your team’s resources. Stream can capture leads from live chats and sync sales chat transcripts in real time with Zendesk Sell—among many other attractive features.

Image source

5. Shopify: Serve customers in real time

Last year, over a million businesses in more than 175 countries were powered by Shopify, and the global ecommerce platform grows bigger by the day. On Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend of 2020—over a span of four days—the company reported over 44 million purchases from Shopify stores, a 50% increase from the previous year.

According to Zendesk’s trends report, companies now think of customer experience as “a continuous conversation.” So do customers themselves—especially when purchasing online. Customers “expect to have one conversation with your company, regardless of which team they’re talking to” and “expect your teams to be talking to each other.”

Do just that by syncing business and customer information with the Shopify app for Zendesk. The app helps eliminate data silos and enhances team coordination. From within Zendesk, an agent has simultaneous access to Shopify data, including order, billing, and shipping information. This is the sort of information you need to make faster, more insightful decisions when interacting with customers.

Image source

6. Geckoboard: Share live Zendesk metrics

When it comes to Zendesk integrations, real-time dashboards can help improve customer data visibility—and with it, your team’s performance. One of the most popular dashboard software tools, Geckoboard, integrates with your help desk to monitor live data across support channels and capture key metrics in one place.

Geckoboard’s dashboard interface is intuitive and easy to read. With it, agents can view live metrics from your Zendesk account, including first-reply time, CSAT, and ticket volume. Add filters and other customizations to visualize the exact data you want. At a glance, you can spot ticket spikes, identify which customers need nurturing, and respond to problems in real time.

With the switch to remote work in 2020, businesses across diverse industries turned to Geckoboard to share data and foster collaboration. Especially for teams that had never worked remotely before, Geckoboard’s dashboards helped them track tickets, distribute workload, and keep physically disconnected members on the same page.

Image source

7. Mailchimp: Make Zendesk your one-stop email shop

As we’ve seen, a support team’s performance depends on the amount of customer data they can access. According to Zendesk’s report, companies that “that leverage the most customer data — defined as those in the top 25% of managing data relative to other similar companies — see 36 percent faster resolutions and a 79 percent reduction in wait time.” Email marketing is a big piece of that equation.

One of the world’s most popular marketing platforms, Mailchimp delivered close to 40 billion transactional emails in 2020 alone. That translates into a whole lot of data for your team to tap into. Mailchimp has two support-focused Zendesk integrations to help you do that.

One of the apps, Mailchimp Activity, enhances your customer profile by displaying—on the ticket page—which email campaigns a customer has received and how they’ve responded to each one. With this information, you can better anticipate and stay ahead of potential customer issues. Then, use the Mailchimp Campaign app to send emails proactively to your customers right from Zendesk.

Image source

Choose the best Zendesk integrations for your team

With this collection of Zendesk integrations, you can leverage the agile technology trend to streamline time-consuming processes, make your team faster and nimbler, and stay ahead of the competition. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll free up your agents to spend more time where it counts: with customers.

Learn how SupportLogic’s Service Experience Platform can elevate your customer experience, and test drive it today.