Zendesk has announced that it has acquired the Montreal-based company Smooch which provides a platform to help connect businesses with customers across a wide variety of messaging platforms both on the web and on mobile.
The acquisition will help the customer service software company deliver the best omnichannel experiences by connecting conversations between businesses and their customers on any messaging channel with support for the world's leading messaging apps including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Currently Smooch is one of the largest providers of WhatsApp Business integration and Zendesk customers will soon be able reach the app's 1.5bn users to manage service interactions and engage with customers directly through Zendesk Chat as part of its early access program.
- Start experimenting with AI to improve your customer service today
- What are the best smart tools and solutions for your business?
- Beyond the bot: why AI in customer service means more than just chatbots
Founder, CEO and chairman of Zendesk, Mikkel Svane praised Smooch's progress in advancing the conversational experience, saying:
“We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences. 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.”
Future of CRM
As Smooch offers an API and SDK-based development platform build on AWS, Zendesk's acquisition of the company furthers its commitment to an open and flexible CRM that businesses can utilize to build and offer differentiated customer experiences.
Co-founder and CEO of Smooch, Warren Levitan explained how the deal will allow Zendesk to boost its CRM capabilities, saying:
“With their launch of Sunshine last year, Zendesk took the bold and disruptive step required to compete for and win the future of CRM. 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 the two companies will drive the next wave of connected conversations on wide variety of messaging channels including, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, Twitter DM, Viber, Kakao Talk, SMS and RCS through native web, iOS and Android apps.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- We've also highlighted the best CRM
