Thank you to everyone who joined our PM Roundtable on outbound messaging use cases at Zendesk. We truly value the time you spent with us, your keen attention, and the insightful feedback you shared. Below, you'll find the main points we discussed, along with the recording and presentation slides.
Feature 1: Relay: An app to send bulk, proactive WhatsApp and SMS messages
What the new Built by Zendesk app enables you to do:
- Create WhatsApp templates and submit them for approval
- Create SMS message templates
- Include buttons, quick replies, attachments, headers and footers for rich, interactive messaging experiences
- Insert dynamic values in messages to personalize for end users
- Preview your templates across channels prior to submitting or sending
- Craft your audience using Zendesk search syntax, tags, fields, and metadata
- Send SMS and WhatsApp messages (with templates approved by Meta) right from within Zendesk
Feedback we heard from you:
- Easily pulling customer contacts from other CRMs could enable additional use cases
- It’s critical that conversations and users are mapped to the appropriate end users and tickets in Zendesk, so that agents can work accurately and efficiently
- Critical metrics for reporting include deliverability rate, read rate, click through rate, response rate, unsubscribe rate, and CSAT
Key Details:
- This app will be available on the Zendesk app marketplace in April 2024.
- To submit and send WhatsApp template messages to end users, you must have at least one phone number connected to the WhatsApp Business API. If you haven't already done this, then complete the self-service process to create your WhatsApp Business account and to connect a phone number to it (see Adding WhatsApp channels to the Zendesk Agent workspace).
- There is no additional license fee for this app. You may incur Sunshine Conversations charges after 25,000 MAUs, and you will incur WhatsApp charges.
Feature 2: Enabling 1:1 proactive messaging from the omni-composer over WhatsApp and SMS
What this new feature will enable you to do:
- Enabling agents to create a proactive ticket for end users, and send via WhatsApp or SMS.
- Enabling this ticket creation on the Zendesk Support mobile app.
- Routing end user responses to the correct ticket and conversation in Agent Workspace.
Feedback we heard from you:
- You’d like to be able to channel change from email or Talk to WhatsApp or SMS, at a customer’s request.
- The inability to send an SMS to non-primary phone numbers creates a cumbersome workflow where you need to delete and re-add phone numbers. This should be streamlined.
Key Details:
- This functionality will be available in Q3
- There is currently no additional license fee for this feature. You may incur Sunshine Conversations charges after 25,000 MAUs, and you will incur WhatsApp charges.
- To submit and send WhatsApp template messages to end users, you must have at least one phone number connected to the WhatsApp Business API.
- If you haven't already done this, then complete the self-service process to create your WhatsApp Business account and to connect a phone number to it (see Adding WhatsApp channels to the Zendesk Agent workspace).