Top 10 Customer Service and Helpdesk software

Latest news about Customer Service and Helpdesk software

2022. Incident.io looks to beef up its Slack-based incident response platform with $28.7M funding



Incident.io, a startup that wants to fix fragmentation between customer success and engineering tools, has raised $28.7M. While engineering tools don’t play well with governance, risk and compliance platforms — resulting in few decision-makers seeing the impact of failure in one place. With Incident.io, everything happens in Slack. Incidents are announced in a channel and trigger workflows that update throughout the mitigation and resolution process. Team members can share updates, set links and update status pages from the channel, as well as assign roles and call in specialists via external tools like PagerDuty. New people who join the channel get a summary post and Zoom link, plus a button to subscribe to developments as they happen.


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.

2022. Customer support management platform Assembled lands $51M



Assembled, which bills itself as a workforce management platform for customer support teams, today announced that it raised $51 million in a Series B funding round. Assembled attempts to predict and prepare for influxes of customer calls, texts and emails through a range of forecasting and scheduling techniques. For example, the platform draws on historical support tickets and even Reddit activity to anticipate future volumes of customer requests (by queue, channel and site). Simulation models project how things like email backlogs might evolve over time under different staffing conditions, while optimization algorithms create schedules — respecting rules such as the length of shifts, the amount of time between shifts and the amount of flexibility at a shift’s start.


2022. Customer service automation startup Lang lands $15M



Lang.ai, a startup developing a platform that automatically tags customer conversations to resolve service issues ostensibly more quickly, has raised $15M. Lang uses AI to extract concepts from customer requests in existing help desk platforms like Zendesk and Intercom. The no-code product appends incoming messages, including emails and texts, with labels like “Talk to agent,” “Delivery issue” and “Platform question.” Using Lang, companies can visually group concepts identified in customer support data and set up automations that trigger with specific labels (e.g. respond to questions about package deliveries with boilerplate text).


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. Customer support startup Gorgias raises $25M



Ecommerce helpdesk startup Gorgias has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The startup says it now supports more than 4,500 stores, including Steve Madden, Timbuk2, Fjällräven, Marine Layer, Ellana, Electrolux and Sergio Tacchini. And revenue has grown 200% this year. The startup is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers, rather than going through intermediaries like Amazon — for example, he pointed to Nike’s recent decision to pull its products from Amazon. The product integrates with Shopify, using AI and customer data to automate responses to basic questions like, “What’s my tracking number?” By doing this, the business can free customer service representatives from spending most of their time responding to these routine requests, and the customers get faster answers.


2020. Salesforce announces new Service Cloud workforce planning tool



With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing a new product called Service Cloud Workforce Engagement. Like many Salesforce products, this one is made up of several key components to deliver a complete solution. For starters, there is Service Forecast for Customer 360, a tool that helps predict workforce requirements and uses AI to distribute customer service requests in a way that makes sense. Next up is Omnichannel Capacity Planning, which helps managers distribute CSAs across channels such as phone, messaging or email wherever they are needed most based on the demand across a given channel. Finally, there is a teaching component that helps coach customer service agents to give the correct answer in the correct way for a given situation.


2020. Facebook buys Kustomer for $1B



Facebook is acquiring Kustomer, a startup founded with the aim of disrupting the customer services industry with a new approach to providing agents with better data and a more unified picture of users by bringing together the many social media and other channels and longer history between them and the company in question. The social network has been slowly building up a big business providing customer services to businesses on its platform, and the plan now is to double down on that with a platform that will do much more of that, potentially as a paid service. As Facebook starts to see more keen competition from the likes of Snapchat, TikTok, having a better product to sell businesses alongside their other services will give Facebook a better way of locking them into the Facebook ecosystem.


2020. DigitalBrain snags $3.4M seed to streamline customer service tasks



DigitalBrain is a layer that sits on top of customer service software like Zendesk to streamline tasks and ease the job of customer service agents. Today the company announced a $3.4 million seed investment. Customer service reps work in DigitalBrain to process their tickets, and as they come upon a problem such as canceling an order or reporting a bug, instead of traversing several systems to fix it, they choose the appropriate action in DigitalBrain, enter the required information and the problem is resolved for them automatically. In the case of a bug, it would file a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it would take all of the actions and update all of the records required by this request.


2020. Wix launches a new company, Wix Answers, to unify customer support



Website-building platform Wix has launched a new company Wix Answers, which offers enterprise-level customer support and is intended to compete with companies like Zendesk and Salesforce. It’s a product that the company built to meet its own needs, which it subsequently productized and spun out into a separate entity (still owned by Wix). The system provides 360 degree view of the user and showing all the customer service conversations they’ve had across channels, whether that’s via phone call, chat, website ticket or email. The platform uses AI to help customer support agents respond more quickly, and to recommend ways to make the team more effective (like making customer support articles more accessible).


2020. Kustomer acquires Reply.ai to enhance chatbots on its customer service CRM



CRM startup Kustomer is acquiring Reply.ai, a startup originally founded in Madrid that has built a code-free platform for companies to create customised chatbots to handle customer service enquires that use machine learning to, over time, become better at responding to those inbound contacts. Reply.ai's customers include Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Samsung, and a number of retailers and major ad and marketing agencies working on behalf of clients. Kustomer is taking on the bigger names in CRM, including Salesforce, Zendesk and Oracle, by providing a platform that makes it easier for human agents to handle inbound “omnichannel” customer requests


2020. Atlassian acquires Halp to bring Slack integration to the forefront



Atlassian has acquired Halp, an early-stage startup that enables companies to build integrated help desk ticketing and automated answers inside Slack. Halp also announced its second product, called Halp Answers. The new tool will work hand in glove with its previous entry Halp Tickets, which lets Slack users easily create a Help Desk ticket without leaving the tool. Halp Answers enables your teams to leverage the knowledge that already exists within your company to automatically answer tickets right in Slack . That knowledge can be pulled in from Slack messages, Confluence articles or any piece of knowledge in your organization


2020. Kaizo raises $3M for its AI-based tools to improve customer service support teams



Customer service, and the idea of gamifying it to motivate employees, might feel like the last thing on people’s minds at the moment, but it is actually timely and relevant to our current state in responding to and living with the coronavirus. Dutch company Kaizo, which uses AI and gamification to provide feedback on agents’ work, tips on what to do differently, and tools to set and work to goals, has raised $3 million. Kaizo has already 500 companies including Truecaller, SimpleSurance, Miro, CreditRepairCloud, Justpark, Festicket and Nmbrs are using its software, covering “thousands” of customer support agents, which use a mixture of free and paid tools that integrate with established CRM software from the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk and more.


2020. Assembled raises $3.1M to build the operating system for support teams



Assembled is coming out of stealth mode with a platform that’s built specifically to address the kinds of questions and issues that customer support teams encounter and — answered well — can help them work much better. The service to become the operating system for support teams. Most immediately, the company’s focus will be on agent performance. Out of the gate, Assembled is announcing $3.1 million in seed funding led by Stripe.


2020. Dixa, a customer engagement platform, picks up $36M


Dixa, the customer engagement platform, has closed a $36 million Series B. Dixa wants to end bad customer service with the help of technology that claims to be able to facilitate more personalised customer support. Dubbed a “customer friendship” platform, the Dixa cloud-based software works across multiple channels — including phone, chat, e-mail, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SMS — and employs a smart routing system so the right support requests reach the right people within an organisation. More broadly, the platform competes with Zendesk, Freshdesk and Salesforce Servicecloud.


2019. Kustomer raises $60M for its omnichannel-based customer service platform



Kustomer, the customer service startup that’s taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce and many other bigger and older providers, has closed $60 million round of funding — no less than its third fundraise of the year — as it continues to double down on its new approach to managing customers in today’s digital world. Unlike Zendesk and Salesforce that build their businesses around the concept of really useful tools for customer service agents to use in largely traditional environments, where phone, email and possibly web-based chat made up the majority of inbound contact from customers, Kustomer has taken a different route with an “omnichannel” concept: the idea is to be able to capture conversations anywhere, whether it’s social media channels, messaging apps or — yes — phone, email and website chat, and bring them into a single customer view.


2019. AI-based e-commerce helpdesk Gorgias raises $14M


Gorgias, a startup offering artificial intelligence tools for customer service and support, is announcing that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding. Gorgias is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers, rather than going through intermediaries like Amazon. The product integrates with Shopify, using AI and customer data to automate responses to basic questions like, “What’s my tracking number?” By doing this, the business can free customer service representatives from spending most of their time responding to these routine requests, and the customers get faster answers.


2019. Moveworks snags $75M Series B to resolve help desk tickets with AI


Moveworks, a startup using AI to help resolve help desk tickets in an automated fashion, announced a $75 million Series B investment. Moveworks is a machine learning platform that uses natural language understanding to take tickets that are submitted by employees every day to their IT teams for stuff they need, understands the content of the tickets, interprets them, and then takes the actions to resolve them automatically. This should lead to greater user satisfaction because some of their problems can be resolved immediately, even when IT personnel aren’t around to help. Instead of filing a ticket and waiting for an answer, Moveworks can provide the answer, at least part of the time, without human intervention.


2019. Freshworks raises $150M Series H on $3.5B valuation



Freshworks, a company that makes SaaS helpdesk and CRM software, announced a $150 million Series H investment on a hefty $3.5 billion valuation. The company also announced today a new unified data platform called the “Customer-for-Life Cloud” that runs across all of its tools. It covers marketing, sales, support and customer success — all of the aspects of a customer across the entire life cycle journey and brings them to a common data model where a business that is using Freshworks can see the entire life cycle of the customer. Freshworks, which launched in 2010, has almost 2,500 employees, a number that’s sure to go up with this new investment. It has 250,000 customers worldwide, including almost 40,000 paying customers. These including Bridgestone Tires, Honda, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco.


2019. Zendesk enabled customer service via WhatsApp


Last spring Zendesk acquired Smooch to move more deeply into messaging app integration. And now the company announced it integrated 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 use WhatsApp as a primary channel for communication, this is a big deal. 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.


2019. Zendesk acquired Smooch to improve support via messaging apps like WhatsApp



Customer support service Zendesk 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. It had also been a longtime partner of Zendesk’s, powering the company’s own WhatsApp Business integration and other features. 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.


2019. Freshworks acquired customer success service Natero



Customer engagement service provider Freshworks, which develops Freshdesk, has acquired Natero, a customer success service with some AI/ML smarts that helps businesses prevent churn and manage their customers. The acquisition will help the company complete its mission to provide its users with a 360-degree view of their customers. Freshdesk started out with a focus on customer support and then added additional functionality for marketers and other roles over time. Today, however, companies want this full 360-degree view of a customer and to be able to offer differentiated service to their top customers, for example. In many ways, the acquisition of Natero closes the loop here.


2019. ServiceNow acquires mobile analytics startup Appsee



ServiceNow has acquired mobile analytics company Appsee. Appsee provides more than pure numerical analytics. As the name it implies, it lets developers see what the user is seeing by recording an interaction and seeing what went right or wrong as the person used the program. ServiceNow wants to take that functionality and incorporate it into its Now Platform, which enables customers to create customized service applications for their businesses, or use mobile applications it has created out of the box. The company sees this as a way to improve the UI and build more usable apps.


2019. Freshworks launches a load balancer for handling customer inquiries



Customer engagement software vendor Freshworks launched Omniroute - the tool for customer service agents. Omniroute is essentially a load-balancer for routing multi-channel customer inquiries. Freshworks argues that earlier customer support solutions made it hard for agents to switch between inquiry types and for managers to efficiently route traffic. The promise of Omniroute is that it can automatically route a query to the right agent who has the bandwidth to handle it, based on what it knows about that agent’s skills and the nature of the inquiry. And if you regularly want to hang up your phone when an agent asks you for your order number right after you typed it into the system, then you’ll be happy to hear that the Omniroute will surface this information right on the agent’s screen.


2018. Zoho Desk adds AI assistant for customer service



Service management software Zoho Desk is getting new capabilities that allow businesses to elevate agent productivity, manage cross-functional service processes, and contextually integrate customer service with other business functions. Voice and Chat Assistant: Zia helps reduce the load on customer service teams. Through Zia Voice, customers can speak or chat with Zia to receive answers from a knowledge base. Agents can also speak or chat with Zia to receive response suggestions while helping customers. Zia suggests specific sections of a knowledge-base article rather than the entire article. Agents can also speak or chat with Zia to receive response suggestions while helping customers. Zia suggests specific sections of a knowledge-base article rather than the entire article. Agents can add these suggestions to a response with a single click and send the same to the customer.


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. Atlassian launches Jira Ops for managing incidents



Atlassian launched a new edition of its flagship product Jira that is meant to help ops teams handle incidents faster and more efficiently. Jira Ops integrates with tools like OpsGenie, PagerDuty, xMatters, Statuspage, Slack and others. Many teams already use these tools when their services go down, but Atlassian argues that most companies currently use a rather ad hoc approach to working with them. Jira Ops aims to be the glue that keeps everybody on the same page and provides visibility into ongoing incidents. With it when an incident happens, you have a central place where you can go, where you can find out everything about the incident. You can see who has been paged and alerted; you can alert more people if you need to right from there; you know what Slack channel the incident is being discussed in. Moreover Atlassian has acquired OpsGenie for $295 million.


2018. ServiceNow integrated with Box



Two enterprise cloud giants ServiceNow and Box have announced a new integration. For ServiceNow customers, it means that they can access Box content without leaving a ServiceNow application and changing focus.  On a practical level, customers can grab the Box plug-in from the ServiceNow Store. It comes with some prebuilt workflows for typical ServiceNow product usage scenarios, but the integration is flexible and allows customization. As an example, in an HR scenario, the ServiceNow administrator might build a workflow for onboarding a new employee in ServiceNow’s HR application. Using the company’s Flow Designer workflow-building tool, they can pull in all the documents a new employee needs to sign with other tasks into a single workflow.


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. Zoho Desk introduced Compact Mode, Ticket Peek, and Snippets



Zoho Desk, the service that helps customer service teams take advantage of context to improve the quality of their support, is adding more tools to take on alternatives. The new Compact Mode brings you all the functionality of the classic ticket list, but shows you nearly twice the number of tickets without navigating to a second screen. Another new feature - Ticket Peek is a lightweight response screen for agents to respond to tickets quickly. When agents ‘peek’ into a ticket, they can see all of the interactions within that ticket, as well as all of the ticket’s properties and applicable solutions. Besides, agents can now use Snippets - pre-written phrases that can be invoked in a response by hitting the Tab key.