Pipedrive vs Zendesk

2022. Zendesk is acquired for $10.2B



Zendesk turned down a $17 billion acquisition in February believing it was worth more. Today it was acquired for $10.2 billion by a consortium of private equity firms, well below that original offer. But the SaaS market has shifted dramatically over the last few months, and Zendesk has been caught in the middle of it in a maelstrom of investor drama. Earlier this month, the company concluded it would stay independent, a move that caused the stock price to plunge.


2021. Zendesk acquires AI automation startup Cleverly to advance customer service



Zendesk has announced the acquisition of early-stage artificial intelligence startup Cleverly. Cleverly’s product platform provides a series of artificial intelligence-powered capabilities, including a triage function to automatically tag incoming service requests to help categorize workflow. The startup also has what it refers to as AI-powered human augmentation with its agent assist capability that aims to help customer service agents provide the right answers to inquiries. The company’s technology already integrates with Zendesk, as well as with Salesforce.


2020. Sales CRM Pipedrive becomes unicorn



Pipedrive, the sales CRM tool for small and medium-sized businesses, is the latest European company to reach unicorn status. The company has taken a majority investment from U.S. enterprise software-focused private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and is now valued at $1.5 billion dollars. Pipedrive’s calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people, not their managers — built by sales people, for sales people, if you like — but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play also spanning marketing. Pipedrive claims 95,000 companies use its software.


2020. Zendesk’s latest tools designed to give fuller view of the customer



Two years ago Zendesk, which is widely known for its help desk software, made the move to CRM when it acquired Base. A little later that year, it announced the Sunshine platform, which customers could use to build applications on top of the Zendesk platform. It has been working to integrate the CRM tool more broadly into the platform, and today’s announcement is about giving Zendesk users a broader view of its customers. Zendesk has a great amount of data at its disposal about the customer’s likes and dislikes based on interactions with the help desk side of the house.


2018. Zendesk launched customer service app builder



Zendesk announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset. Companies can build apps on top of Sunshine, typically customer experience or customer relationship apps, and they will be hosted natively on AWS and have access to all the AWS services. And all of the applications rely on the Sunshine platform for information sharing. 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.


2018. Zendesk launched enterprise content management platform



Zendesk announced a new enterprise content management product specifically geared for large customer service organizations. It’s called Guide Enterprise and it’s designed to provide those larger customer service organizations with a knowledge base and a content management platform for editorial planning and review. The idea is to empower customer service reps to write up solutions to problems they encounter and build up that knowledge base as part of the natural act of doing their jobs. The reps can find their fellow employees’ notes and not have to reinvent the wheel every time, and the notes and articles they write can pass through editorial review and become part of the permanent knowledge base. When customers hit the site or app, they can access solutions to common problems before having to talk to a human. The platform also includes reminders to check the content regularly so the knowledge base stays fresh and stale content is removed.


2017. Pipedrive CRM gets $17M



Pipedrive, a CRM platform designed to help SMBs sell more, has closed $17 million in Series B funding. Pipedrive says will use the new capital to develop its product and tech, grow its partner ecosystem, and for global marketing. Pipedrive says it now has more than 30,000 paying small business customers from more than 140 countries, making it a genuine contender against more established players in the CRM space for SMB. Its calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people not their managers but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play. This has seen Pipedrive integrate with 50-plus online software solutions, adding more each month. These include various business tools such as Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Yesware, and Pandadoc.


2016. Zendesk expands beyond the help desk



Customer service app Zendesk unveiled a new product Zendesk Explore that provides analytics to measure and understand the entire customer experience. With Zendesk Explore, you get instant access to the customer analytics that matter—and the deeper understanding of your customers and business that comes with it. It's taking data from Zendesk’s myriad tools or third-party systems like customer data in Salesforce, buying history in Shopify or web analytics from Google Analytics and pulling it all together into one central place. It can deliver this information, regardless of role to get a much fuller view of the customer than you can get with bits of information trapped inside application silos.


2016. Zendesk introduced Zendesk Message



Zendesk, the leading customer support software, adds the new feature - Message - the messaging product that helps businesses engage customers on their favorite messaging platforms. The first of these messaging platforms is Facebook Messenger. Zendesk Message is easy to use and designed specifically for messaging. Since messaging interactions tend to occur in short bursts, we made it easy for agents to move quickly from one conversation to the next, while keeping it easy to assign, own, and resolve conversations. Agents will be able to easily reference important events in a long conversation stream with features like timeline.


2015. Zendesk acquired Business Intelligence service BIME Analytics



Customer support giant Zendesk has acquired BIME Analytics for $45 million. BIME Analytics is a business intelligence startup with a software-as-a-service approach. It turns data from many different sources into trends and insights. The startup provides dozens of data connectors in order to aggregate data from multiple sources — Bigquery, CSV, Excel, Intercom, Google Analytics, Salesforce and more. You can name a data point for business intelligence purposes, and chances are BIME already supports it. Then you can create interactive dashboards, advanced visualizations or exploit the results using SQL queries. Everything is fast and distributed, you won’t have to manage servers to do these data manipulations.