Zendesk witnesses growing signups from traditional businesses in India

Growth is on the mind of NYSE-listed customer service software firm Zendesk. The company recently surpassed a $500 million annual revenue run rate and is aiming to be a $1 billion business by 2020.

In an interaction with ETtech, Zendesk's vice president sales for APAC region Sandie Overtveld and India country head KT Prasad said that India will play a key role in achieving this goal.

"India is a very significant market for us and is at a high priority in terms of investment. There is an enormous base of small and medium enterprises that is digitizing at a rapid pace." said Overtveld.

He said that India provides a unique scale and access to customers "who want to do stuff at a large scale". This is crucial as the response time expectations are shrinking with the adoption of social media and chat apps.

"We are doing a lot of background work with our customers to figure out what is the most efficient way to deal it at scale, what's the threshold where people are ok with interacting with bots and when do they need a human interaction and how do you do a natural handoff between both of them" said Overtveld.

Zendesk officially launched its operations in September 2016, although the company already had 1,700 paying customers from the country prior to the launch. This included ride-hailing giant Ola, matrimonial site Shaadi.com, horizontal classifieds portal OLX and E-pharmacy platform Pharmeasy.

"In the last year or so, we have put in fundamental blocks for a business in India to do business at scale." Prasad said.

While Zendesk's customers have typically been digital businesses across various sectors, Prasad said they are now witnessing a growing number of signups from traditional businesses in India like HDFC Securities that uses Zendesk's technology to ramp up its sales operations.

"One of the largest FMCG company has also signed up with us to improve their customer experience," he said without disclosing specific details.

While Zendesk's predominant customer base has been small and medium businesses, it is now increasingly catering to mid-market and enterprise customers. Earlier this month, Zendesk said that around 40% of its revenues is now coming from these larger customers.

New products

Zendesk is also investing significantly on building newer products and releasing product enhancements to their existing products.

It recently launched a product called Answering bot, which is a paid add-on to the company's support product. The product responds to consumer's queries by looking up the knowledge base of the customer and providing the relevant knowledge base articles.

"The biggest channel that businesses forget is self-service. There is a myth that people want to make a phone call and speak to you. It's only because they are so irritated that they can't help themselves" said Overtveld.

Zendesk had also acquired a company called Outbound.io in May 2017 and is set to launch it as a new product called Zendesk Connect that will enable businesses to connect to their consumers proactively on a particular behaviour.

Through Connect, the US-based company said it will initially offer new customer segmentation and customer activity history for its support customers as well as drive proactive campaigns across web, email, and mobile channels.

Earlier this month, Zendesk launched Guide Enterprise, an enterprise product for larger organizations to create better self-service experiences for their customers.

The product is expected to make it easier for large teams to collaborate on content and manage their knowledge base internally, externally and across multiple brands. A new feature called Content Cues uses machine learning to help content managers identify gaps in their existing knowledge base and provide recommendations to either create relevant help articles or update existing ones with new content.

Zendesk also has an app marketplace to address local needs or vertical-specific needs of businesses. The marketplace claims to have over 675 apps including Indian apps like Exotel, Knowlarity's Super Receptionist, and Ozonetel's CloudAgent.