Zendesk, Inc. is launching Sunshine, an open and flexible customer relationship management (CRM) platform built completely in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“It’s really focused on the data layer,” said Sam Boonin, VP, product strategy, Zendesk. “We wanted to do this in a different way. What our philosophy on this is that we’ve built everything natively on the public cloud. We’re leveraging AWS to build a lot of capabilities.”
Zendesk Sunshine enables businesses to connect and understand all their customer data, wherever it lives, and gives their developers the ability to build and deploy customer apps and services faster.
Sunshine is built entirely on open standards, with the security, scalability and reliability of AWS built into its core.
Sunshine launches with powerful capabilities including profiles, events, and custom objects that allow customers to store and connect to all their customer data and build rich system.
With profiles, businesses can create a single, unified view of the customer across all applications.
Using events, companies can capture any customer activity such as customer service interactions, website visits, purchase transactions, and shipping history in a historical timeline.
Custom objects allows companies to collect additional relevant information like products owned, equipment rented, or even telemetrics from a connected car from outside sources, then store this data directly within Zendesk.
Integrating seamlessly with all of its products, Zendesk Explore makes it easier for companies to see and analyze data across all Zendesk support channels.
With Explore, businesses can now get a single view of the customer across all teams and channels so they can focus on measuring and improving the experience they deliver.
Customer support teams inside midsize companies, developers, and more will benefit the most from Sunshine.
“We want to take advantage of the millions of web developers out there comfortable with open source tools that are using Amazon and other clouds in order to build and deploy their applications,” Boonin said. “We’re hoping that by taking this open approach we’ll be able to attract more and more developers to Zendesk.”
The company is also releasing Zendesk Sell, a new sales force automation (SFA) tool built to enhance productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility for sales teams.
With Sell, information will be able to flow seamlessly between support and sales on the Sunshine CRM platform, resulting in a single conversation with customers and better alignment between teams.
Moving forward the company will work to support changing trends and workloads, according to Boonin.
“We’ll be putting a lot of emphasis into developing in 2019,” Boonin said.
For more information about this release, visit www.zendesk.com.