Zendesk
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Zendesk puts Smooch acquisition to work with WhatsApp integration
Zendesk has always been all about customer service. Last spring it purchased Smooch to move more deeply into messaging app integration. Today, the company announced it was integrating WhatsApp, the popular messaging tool, into the Zendesk customer service toolkit.
Smooch was an early participant in the WhatsApp Business API program. What that does, in practice, says Warren Levitan, who came over as part of the Smooch deal, is provide a direct WhatsApp phone number for businesses using Zendesk . Given how many people, especially in Asia and Latin America, use WhatsApp as a primary channel for communication, this is a big deal.
“The WhatsApp Business API Connector is now fully integrated into Zendesk support. It will allow any Zendesk support customer to be up and running with a new WhatsApp number quicker than ever before, allowing them to connect to the 1.5 billion WhatsApp users worldwide, communicating with them on their channel of choice,” Levitan explained.
Levitan says the entire WhatsApp interaction experience is now fully integrated into the same Zendesk interface that customer service reps are used to using. WhatsApp simply becomes another channel for them.
“They can access WhatsApp conversations from within the same workspace and agent desktop, where they handle all of their other conversations. From an agent perspective, there are no new tools, no new workflows, no new reporting. And that’s what really allows them to get up and running quickly,” he said.
Customers may click or touch a button to dial the WhatsApp number, or they may use a QR code, which is a popular way of accessing WhatsApp customer service. As an example, Levitan says Four Seasons hotels prints a QR code on room key cards, and if customers want to access customer service, they can simply scan the code and the number dials automatically.
Zendesk has been able to get close to 1,000 businesses up and running as part of the early access program, but now it really wants to scale that and allow many more businesses to participate. Up until now, Facebook has taken a controlled approach to on-boarding, having to approve each brand’s number before allowing it on the platform. Zendesk has been working to streamline that.
“We’ve worked tightly with Facebook (the owner of WhatsApp), so that we can have an integrated brand approval and on-boarding/activation to get their number lit up. We can now launch customers at scale, and have them up and running in days, whereas before it was more typically a multi-week process,” Levitan said.
For now, when the person connects to customer service via WhatsApp, it’s only via text messaging — there is no voice connection, and no plans for any for the time being, according to Levitan. Zendesk-WhatsApp integration is available starting today worldwide.
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Klaus, the ‘conversation review’ tool for support teams, picks up $1.9M seed
“No bad conversations between companies and their customers is what we’re shooting for,” Kair Käsper tells me. He’s the head of Growth of a relatively new startup called Klaus, which he founded together with old high school friend Martin Kõiva.
Most recently the pair were employees at Pipedrive, holding the roles of director of Product Marketing and global head of Customer Support, respectively. Many years prior to that they shared a flat together and worked on a number of projects. One of those was an applicant-tracking startup called Jobkitten “that didn’t really go anywhere.”
The latest Käsper and Kõiva venture, however, appears to already be on firmer footing. Described as a “conversation review and QA tool for support teams,” Klaus is designed to help companies improve the quality of customer service. Two years in the making but only launched formally six months ago, customers already include Automattic, Wistia and Soundcloud. And today the Estonian startup is disclosing $1.9 million in seed funding led by Creandum, the first Baltic investment by the Swedish VC firm and the first from its new fund.
“The problem is that maintaining an even, high level of customer service quality is hard,” explains Käsper. “It becomes even harder if you have over 20,000 monthly conversations with customers and your support team is 100 people in three offices.
“As the head of customer support, you want everyone on your team to provide answers that meet with internal standards, regardless of how long they’ve been with the company or how seriously they take their job. You get very anxious in this situation, because you have no idea about what’s going on in those thousands of conversations. For you, no visibility means no control.”
He says that his and Kõiva’s firsthand experience at Pipedrive taught them that the key to quality assurance is going through past interactions and giving systematic feedback to agents. “Kind of like code review in engineering or the editorial process in writing,” he says. “Teams all over the world are discovering this now, but they almost always start with a manual process, managed in spreadsheets. They get stuck fast.”
To make this type of feedback loop more scalable, Klaus has created a purpose-built UI for giving internal feedback. Smartly, it also integrates with modern SaaS help desk solutions, such as Zendesk and Intercom.
“[The software also has] countless specialized features that allow you to focus on the actual feedback instead of managing a spreadsheet,” adds the Klaus head of Growth. They include the ability to easily filter out conversations for review, rate them based on a customized score card and notify agents of received feedback through email or Slack.
Meanwhile, the young company makes money by charging a monthly or yearly subscription fee based on how many users are connected to its app. In other words, just like Pipedrive before it, another classic enterprise SaaS play out of Estonia.
Update: An earlier version of this article wrongly said that Kair Käsper is CEO of Klaus; his job title is actually head of Growth.
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Enterprise healthcare platform Collective Health raises $205M led by SoftBank
SoftBank’s Vision Fund may be facing some challenges when it comes to restocking its massive reserves, but the firm famous for cutting big checks is leading a sizeable round for Collective Health. This startup focused on enterprise employee healthcare management announced a $205 million Series E raise today, bringing its total funding to $434 million since its founding in 2013. Its last raise was a $110 million round in February, 2018.
Collective Healths’ client list includes Red Bull, Pinterest, Zendesk and more, and it counts GV, NEA, DFJ Growth and Sun Life among its financial backers. Its platform is an integrator for the various insurance and benefit providers that large employers offer to their employees, and provides access to info, as well as claims filing, eligibility checks and data sharing across vendors. The funding will also help with additional engineering hires to continue to build out the platform.
The funding will help the company add more partner providers, a process that’s key to continued growth as it seeks to expand its footprint and ensure that it can serve customers and their employees across the U.S. In addition to the Vision Fund, this round included new investors PSP Investments, DFJ Growth and G Squared, as well as new participation from existing investors.
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Zendesk acquires Smooch, doubles down on support via messaging apps like WhatsApp
One of the bigger developments in customer services has been the impact of social media — both as a place to vent frustration or praise (mostly frustration) and — especially over messaging apps — as a place for businesses to connect with their users.
Now, customer support specialist Zendesk has made an acquisition so that it can make a bigger move into how it works within social media platforms, and specifically messaging apps: it has acquired Smooch, a startup that describes itself as an “omnichannel messaging platform,” which companies’ customer care teams can use to interact with people over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Messenger, as well as SMS and email.
Smooch was in fact one of the first partners for the WhatsApp Business API, alongside VoiceSage, Nexmo, Infobip, Twilio, MessageBird and others already advertising their services in this area.
It had also been a longtime partner of Zendesk’s, powering the company’s own WhatsApp Business integration and other features. The two already have some customers in common, including Uber. Other Smooch customers include Four Seasons, SXSW, Betterment, Clarabridge, Harry’s, LVMH, Delivery Hero and BarkBox.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Zendesk SVP class=”il”>Shawna Wolverton said in an interview that the startup’s entire team of 48, led by co-founder and CEO Warren Levitan, are being offered positions with Zendesk. Smooch is based out of Montreal, Canada — so this represents an expansion for Zendesk into building an office in Canada.
Its backers included iNovia, TA Associates and Real Ventures, who collectively had backed it with less than $10 million (when you leave the inflated hills surrounding Silicon Valley, numbers magically decline). As Zendesk is publicly traded, we may get more of a picture of the price in future quarterly reports. This is the company’s fifth acquisition to date.
The deal underscores the big impact that messaging apps are making in customer service. While phone and internet are massive points of contact, messaging apps is one of the most-requested features Zendesk’s customers are requesting, “because they want to be where their customers are,” with WhatsApp — now at 1.5 billion users — currently at the top of the pile, Wolverton said. (More than half of Zendesk’s revenues are from outside the U.S., which speaks to why WhatsApp — which is bigger outside the U..S than it is in it — is a popular request.)
That’s partly a by-product of how popular messaging apps are full-stop, with more than 75% of all smartphone users having at least one messaging app in use on their devices.
“We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder, CEO and chairman, in a statement. “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.”
While the two companies were already working together, the acquisition will mean a closer integration.
That will be in multiple areas. Last year, Zendesk launched a new CRM play called Sunshine, going head to head with the likes of Salesforce in helping businesses better organise and make use of customer data. Smooch will build on that strategy to bring in data to Sunshine from messaging apps and the interactions that take place on them. Also last year, Zendesk launched an omnichannel play, a platform called The Suite, which it says “has become one of our most successful products ever,” with a 400% rise in its customers taking an omnichannel approach. Smooch already forms a key part of that, and it will be even more tightly so.
On the outbound side, for now, there will be two areas where Smooch will be used, Wolverton said. First will be on the basic level of giving Zendesk users the ability to see and create messaging app discussions within a dashboard where they are able to monitor and handle all customer relationship contacts: a conversation that was initiated now on, say, Twitter, can be easily moved into WhatsApp or whatever more direct channel someone wants to use.
Second, Wolverton said that customer care workers can use Smooch to send on “micro apps” to users to handle routine service enquiries, for example sending them links to make or change seat assignments on a flight.
Over time, the plan will be to bring more automated options into the experience, which opens the door for using more AI and potentially bots down the line.
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The Exit: Getaround’s $300M roadtrip
In August of last year, Getaround scored $300 million from Softbank. Eight months later they handed that same amount to Drivy, a Parisian peer-to-peer car rental service that was Getaround’s ticket to tapping into European markets.
Alven Capital’s Jeremy Uzan
Both companies shared similar visions for the future of car ownership, they were about the same size, both were flirting with expanding beyond their home market, but only one had the power of the Vision Fund behind it.
The Exit is a new series at TechCrunch. It’s an exit interview of sorts with a VC who was in the right place at the right time but made the right call on an investment that paid off. [Have feedback? Shoot me an email at lucas@techcrunch.com]
Alven Capital partner Jeremy Uzan first invested in Drivy’s seed round in 2013. Uzan joined Index Ventures co-leading a $2 million round that valued the company at less than $10 million. The firms would later join forces again for the company’s $8.3 million Series A.
I chatted at length with Uzan about what lies ahead for the Drive team, what Paris’s startup scene is still in desperate need of, and how Softbank’s power is becoming even more impossible to ignore.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Getting the checkbook
Lucas Matney: So before we dive into this acquisition, tell me a little bit about how you got to the point where you were writing these checks in the first place.
Jeremy Uzan: So, I studied computer science and business and then spent three years as a tech banker. I was actually in a very small investment banking boutique in Paris helping young startups to raise their Series A rounds. They were all French companies, my first deal was with the YouTube competitor DailyMotion.
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Keyword research in 2019: Modern tactics for growing targeted search traffic
Glen Allsopp
Contributor
Contributor
Glen Allsopp is the founder of Detailed.com, an SEO consultancy and newsletter focused on actionable tactics to grow search traffic. He also tracks successful online startups at Gaps.com.
In 2019, it’s estimated that every minute there are 150 new websites coming online. While many of these won’t be long-term ventures, a large percentage will eventually find themselves looking to organic search engine traffic to grow their reach.
This invariably leads people to the task of keyword research; uncovering the search terms most likely to result in prospective customers.
With increased competition it’s imperative you don’t just focus on the traditional sources of keyword inspiration that every other business uses.
In the past year alone I’ve personally helped hundreds of business owners grow search engine traffic to their websites. This responsibility drives me to succeed in one key area: Finding relevant search terms to target that their competitors have likely missed.
In this article, I will highlight some of the most overlooked ideas and sources of data to reveal words and phrases relevant to your business that are high in intent but lacking in competition.
If you can find the keywords your audience are searching for, but your competitors haven’t found, you can leverage a huge advantage to increase traffic and engagement on your content.
Table of Contents
- Be Open to Talking About Your ‘Best’ Competition
- Use [Brand Alternatives] Search Terms to Gain Visibility
- Find Content Opportunities in the ‘People Also Ask’ Box
- Use Public Wikipedia Stats to See If a Term Is Worth Targeting
- Quora’s Ad Platform Reveals Popular Search Terms Without Spending a Penny
- Wikihow’s Public View Counts Are Great for Tutorial-Based Content Inspiration
- Bonus Tip: ProductHunt Dominate ‘Alternatives’ Keywords: Make Sure You Have a Listing There
- To Recap
1. Be Open to Talking About Your ‘Best’ Competition
Google is constantly improving their ability to understand searcher intent. That is, they know what people are looking for and the results that will satisfy those searches.
When it comes to any industry that offers products or services, one of the most common search queries is often some variation of “best [industry] [services / products]”.
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Zendesk just hired three former Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe execs
Today, Zendesk announced it has hired three new executives — Elisabeth Zornes, former general manager of global support for Microsoft Office, as Zendesk’s first chief customer officer; former Adobe executive Colleen Berube as chief information officer and former Salesforce executive Shawna Wolverton as senior vice president, product.
The company emphasized that the hirings were about expanding the executive suite and bringing in top people to help the company grow and move into larger enterprise organizations.
From left to right: Shawna Wolverton, Colleen Berube and Elizabeth Zornes
Zornes comes to Zendesk with 20 years of experience at Microsoft working in a variety of roles around Microsoft Office. She says that what attracted her to Zendesk was its focus on the customer.
“When I look at businesses today, no matter what size, what type or what geography, they can agree on one thing: customer experience is the rocket fuel to drive success. Zendesk has positioned itself as a technology company that empowers companies of all kinds to drive a new level of success by focusing on their customer experience, and helping them to be at the forefront of that was a very intriguing opportunity for me,” Zornes told TechCrunch.
New CIO Berube, who comes with two decades of experience, also sees her new job as a chance to have an impact on customer experience and help companies that are trying to transform into digital organizations. “Customer experience is the linchpin for all organizations to succeed in the digital age. My background is broad, having shepherded many different types of companies through digital transformations, and developing and running modern IT organizations,” she said.
Her boss, CEO and co-founder Mikkel Svane, sees someone who can help continue to grow the company and develop the product. “We looked specifically for a CIO with a modern mindset who understands the challenges of large organizations trying to keep up with customer expectations today,” Svane told TechCrunch.
As for senior VP of product Wolverton, she comes with 15 years of experience, including a stint as head of product at Salesforce. She said that coming to Zendesk was about having an impact on a modern SaaS product. “The opportunity to build a modern, public, cloud-native CRM platform with Sunshine was a large part of my decision to join,” she said.
The three leaders have already joined the organization — Wolverton and Berube joined last month and Zornes started just this week.
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Zendesk shifts to platform play with Zendesk Sunshine launch
Zendesk has always been strongly focused on customer service in the cloud. They began to look at this more broadly in September when they purchased Base to move into sales automation and CRM. Today, the company announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset.
All of this appears to be with an eye toward shifting Zendesk from its core customer service mission to a broader customer management business. Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO at Zendesk, says Sunshine is about moving his company toward a platform play, something that many cloud companies have aspired to. “Sunshine is a platform for building your own apps, and also for managing and storing and connecting all your customer data,” Svane told TechCrunch.
For starters, Zendesk is partnering with AWS to act as the infrastructure services backend for the applications built on the Sunshine platform. “You can build apps on top of Sunshine, typically customer experience or customer relationship apps, and it’s built natively on AWS, so that you have access to all the AWS services. And of course, all of the applications rely on the Sunshine platform for information sharing, etc,” he explained.
He says they deliberately chose the public cloud because they believe that is where developers want to operate today. “We believe that businesses and developers should take advantage of the public cloud paradigms and use frameworks such as Sunshine to build these applications,” he said.
Svane says for starters, this approach is aimed at helping Zendesk customers build applications to take advantage of the data they are collecting inside of Zendesk as a natural byproduct of doing work with the service, but over time independent developers could begin working on the platform too.
He sees today’s announcement as a first step toward expanding the company’s set of products and services, and it’s something they plan to build on in the coming years. “You’re going to see a lot more on our roadmap over the next couple of years to truly embrace our platform mission and our ultimate goal is to be a ubiquitous CRM platform where anyone who wants to can build any kind of customer-facing application, and really benefit from the public cloud and from the Sunshine framework and have data flow seamlessly between services, vendors and applications,” he said.
We saw customer experience take center stage this week when SAP bought Qualtrics for $8 billion. The customer has clearly become increasingly important and Zendesk has access to a lot of customer data, which developers can take advantage of to build customized customer-centric applications. The only thing that’s truly surprising about this announcement is that Zendesk didn’t make a platform play sooner.
But perhaps as a more mature vendor, and with Base in the fold, they feel they are more prepared to make this type of move now than they were in the past. Whatever the reason, every enterprise cloud company worth its salt has tried to be a developer platform, and with today’s announcement, it’s Zendesk’s turn.
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Brex has partnered with WeWork, AWS and more for its new rewards program
Brex, the corporate card built for startups, unveiled its new rewards program today.
The billion-dollar company, which announced its $125 million Series C three weeks ago, has partnered with Amazon Web Services, WeWork, Instacart, Google Ads, SendGrid, Salesforce Essentials, Twilio, Zendesk, Caviar, HubSpot, Orrick, Snap, Clerky and DoorDash to give entrepreneurs the ability to accrue and spend points on services and products they use regularly.
Brex is lead by a pair of 22-year-old serial entrepreneurs who are well aware of the costs associated with building a startup. They’ve been carefully crafting Brex’s list of partners over the last year and say their cardholders will earn roughly 20 percent more rewards on Brex than from any competitor program.
“We didn’t want it to be something that everyone else was doing so we thought, what’s different about startups compared to traditional small businesses?” Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told TechCrunch. “The biggest difference is where they spend money. Most credit card reward systems are designed for personal spend but startups spend a lot more on business.”
Companies that use Brex exclusively will receive 7x points on rideshare, 3x on restaurants, 3x on travel, 2x on recurring software and 1x on all other expenses with no cap on points earned. Brex carriers still using other corporate cards will receive just 1x points on all expenses.
Most corporate cards offer similar benefits for travel and restaurant expenses, but Brex is in a league of its own with the rideshare benefits its offering and especially with the recurring software (SalesForce, HubSpot, etc.) benefits.
San Francisco-based Brex has raised about $200 million to date from investors including Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP. At the time of its fundraise, the company told TechCrunch it planned to use its latest capital infusion to build out its rewards program, hire engineers and figure out how to grow the business’s client base beyond only tech startups.
“This is going to allow us to compete even more with Amex, Chase and the big banks,” Dubugras said.
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Zendesk expands into CRM with Base acquisition
Zendesk has mostly confined itself to customer service scenarios, but it seems that’s not enough anymore. If you want to truly know the customer behind the interaction, you need a customer system of record to go with the customer service component. To fill that need, Zendesk announced it was acquiring Base, a startup that has raised over $50 million.
The companies did not share the purchase price, but Zendesk did report that the acquisition should not have a significant impact on revenue.
While Base might not be as well known as Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle in the CRM game, it has created a sophisticated sales force automation platform, complete with its own artificial intelligence underpinnings. CEO Uzi Shmilovici claimed his company’s AI could compete with its more well-heeled competitors when it was released in 2016 to provide salespeople with meaningful prescriptive advice on how to be more successful.
Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane certainly sees the value of adding a company like Base to his platform. “We want to do for sales what Zendesk has already done for customer service: give salespeople tools built around them and the customers they serve,” he said in a statement.
If the core of customer data includes customer service, CRM and marketing, Base gives Zendesk one more of those missing components, says Brent Leary, owner at CRM Essentials, a firm that keeps close watch on this market.
“Zendesk has a great position in customer service, but now to strengthen their position with midmarket/enterprise customers looking for integrated platforms, Base adds a strong mobile sales force automation piece to their puzzle,” Leary told TechCrunch.
As he points out, we have seen HubSpot make a similar move with HubSpot Apps, while SugarCRM, which was recently sold to Accel-KKR, could be shopping too, with its new owner’s deeper pockets. “This is almost like a CRM enterprise software Hunger Games going on,” he joked. But he indicates that we should be expecting more consolidation here as these companies try to acquire missing pieces of their platforms to offer more complete solutions.
Matt Price, who previously had the title of senior vice president for product portfolio at Zendesk will lead the Base team moving forward.
Base was founded in 2009 and boasts more than 5,000 customers. It’s worth pointing out that Base was already available for sale in the company app marketplace, so there was some overlap here, but the company intends to try to move existing customers to Base, of course.
Zendesk has indicated it will continue to support all Base customers. In addition, Base’s 125 employees have been invited to join Zendesk, so there will be no blood-letting here.
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