Zendesk: CRM Platform that Supports a New Reality

Mikkel Svane, CEO & Founder
We are living in an incredible world where customers are moving to, maybe ‘more reasonable alternatives’ at a very fast pace. Due to the information available at their fingertips, it’s easier for them to stay connected, and as a result, their expectations of a conversation with the brands have also augmented. The result? Businesses are losing their customers in a snap as they are held back by proprietary technologies and legacy systems. So, what’s the solution? Is there a company, which can provide a conversational platform that goes beyond old-school technology and illuminates brands and helps them to step into the light? Mikkel Svane, the CEO and founder of Zendesk writes in a blog, “To make matters worse, legacy CRM platforms force us into their proprietary technology. That makes it difficult, expensive, and nearly impossible to see the many different dimensions of customers and their data—a view that’s required in order to make meaningful improvements to the customer experience. It’s time to break free from CRM systems that lock businesses into an outdated view of customers. We need a CRM platform that supports a new reality.”

Enter Zendesk Sunshine. The company’s novel innovation can turn this idea into an apparent reality. Delivered as an open and flexible CRM platform, Sunshine was unveiled in November 2018 at the company’s Relate conference as a way to help businesses break free. The platform has been developed to allow organizations and brands to connect and comprehend their customer data, irrespective of the source of that data.

Zendesk Sunshine offers an engine for designing intelligent workflows, a flexible data layer for capturing and connecting all the customer data, and APIs and SDKs for building modern user experiences. Natively built in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services, Sunshine enables developers to build their own customer apps or services.
“Users 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,” says Svane. “We believe that businesses and developers should take advantage of the public cloud paradigms and use frameworks such as Sunshine to build these applications.” In addition, Zendesk Sunshine powers all of its Zendesk products and makes them better—such as the new Zendesk Support feature called Customer Interaction History, which provides organizations with a historical timeline of all their customer events right in the Support interface feature of their CRM.


We believe that businesses and developers should take advantage of the public cloud paradigms and use frameworks such as Sunshine to build these applications

Having carved a unique niche in the omnichannel customer support space, Sunshine will push Zendesk further toward success. As Svane announced the launch of Sunshine, he made it clear that this is one of the many steps that Zendesk will be taking to expand the company’s set of products and services—and something that they plan to build on in the coming years. He informs, “In the near future, we will be developing and launching a lot more over the next couple of year s to truly embrace our platform mission. 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.

Company
Zendesk

Headquarters
San Francisco, CA

Management
Mikkel Svane, CEO & Founder

Description
Zendesk Sunshine is a CRM platform that offers a flexible data layer for capturing and connecting all the customer data