“We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences,” says Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane. “That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience.”
Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk, discusses how the company has helped change the world of customer expectations in an interview on CNBC:
Setting a New Bar For Customer Expectations
We are a software company. We build software solutions for better customer engagement, better customer service, and better customer experiences. We have more than 100,000 brands using our software. We are 3,000 people headquartered here in San Francisco. My broken English is because of my background from Denmark, but we’ve been in San Francisco for ten years and it’s been amazing. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that customer expectations have changed like crazy.
We’ve had the opportunity to work and have had the privilege to work with a lot of the companies here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley that have changed the world and changed the world of customer expectations. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, all these companies completely changed how we use services. We have worked with all of these guys and it has helped shape us as a company. It has set a new bar for how people are expecting the customer service and the customer engagements from the products and the services they’re using today.
If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive
We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences. That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. We started very much in the world of traditional inbound customer service. But in the world of CRM (customer relationship management) all the disciplines within that touches the customer whether that be on the sales side, the shopping side, the service side, the marketing side, all of these things seamlessly flow together.
From the customer perspective, it’s just one big experience. You don’t want to know if you are talking to sales or marketing or support, you just want to have one experience. That’s why it’s important for us to help power all of these experiences and bring them together.
Competition is great. Customers go with Zendesk and customers come to us because they want to keep up with customer expectations. That’s not just about digital transformation. It’s really about staying agile, staying quick, and keeping up with the constant change of customer expectations. That’s the world we are in today. What is working today, what is fantastic today, is going to be mundane tomorrow. It’s a generational thing too. Different generations have different expectations. My kids are going to be ruthless.
Empowering Businesses To Provide a Much Better Customer Experience
What we have done most recently is that we’ve launched a new platform concept that is built on AWS called Zendesk Sunshine. It’s open, it’s super scalable. and it’s very developer friendly. It allows you as a business to tie all the different things together. Amazon Web Services is a huge free platform. Every business is moving more and more of the infrastructure to AWS. It’s because it’s an architectural change. It’s a new way of being able to tie everything together without necessarily having to rely on formal partnerships between these businesses. That’s very much what we believe in.
Our customers are serving about a billion consumers and customers every single year. It’s really like helping our customers in keeping up with the massive demand and the massive expectations of businesses today. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience. We really enjoy it.