Companies Can Expand Support Channels and Improve Self-Service with Crowd Sourced Content

Zendesk, Inc. announced the launch of Gather, a powerful new product that enables companies to provide trusted and transparent support to customers through online community forums. Gather creates a space where customers can engage with each other and company experts to offer guidance and insight beyond what a single customer support agent might be able to handle.

“Customers expect relevant and real-time support, which can be challenging to provide at scale,” said Shawna Wolverton, Senior Vice President, Product at Zendesk. “Gather is a way to leverage customer and product experts to provide service representing a wide variety of viewpoints. It’s a place for companies to capture, organize, and share feedback for teams across support, product, engineering, and more. Using a community tool to listen to customers will improve relationships and ultimately their experiences.”

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Peer-provided support adds an extra layer of trust and comfort to customers when they are looking for help. Gather ensures that the most relevant information is surfaced to these customers by proactively involving them in the creation, ranking, and maintenance of knowledge. Because content is created from the customers’ perspective, it incorporates a wide variety of information experienced across unique scenarios and issues.

“Building a community of customer ambassadors is considered the holy grail for many brands, and designing a platform where communities like this can contribute and engage with other customers is a powerful tool in building brand advocacy as well as growing your ability to deliver seamless support faster,” said Abhishek Deshmukh, Managing Director of Singapore and Vice President of Engineering, Zendesk. “With Zendesk Gather, we are giving brands a way to do this better – enabling them to engage better and scale faster and, more importantly, empowering them to listen to their customers better.”

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“Gather lets us focus our service resources on supporting customers that need more expertise,” said Sean Kinney, Senior Director of Support at InVision. “Our enthusiastic community of designers help each other with issues that arise, and we’ve seen some exciting, genuine conversations happening between our customers as a result.”

Brands of all sizes have communities rallied around them. Gather is a powerful way to leverage this engaged customer base to connect and support peers. It provides a space for companies to garner input and insights from the people who know their offering the best and incorporate actual user feedback into products, as opposed to theoretical customer profiles. Internal teams can quickly solicit feedback, easily collaborate on best practices and thoroughly understand how decisions impact customers.

Based on the positive customer feedback and success of community-focused capabilities in Guide Enterprise, Zendesk is investing in a dedicated community product with additional features that:

• Surface the most relevant content to users by featuring popular articles, pinning posts and offering one unified search across both community posts and help center articles.
• Empower members to become community moderators by assigning varying levels of permissions, including the ability to flag, hide, edit, and move user posts.
• Create separate, customized communities to serve different audiences, regions, and brands across a company.

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