Zendesk is partnering with Discord, the fast-growing free voice and text chat application used by more than 14 million gamers a day, to improve Zendesk’s customer support platform.
Game publishers can use the Zendesk platform to offer customer support to gamers or community moderators directly from within the Discord interface. Gamers can get help from the publisher’s customer service agents without ever having to leave a game.
Discord recently announced that it has more than 150 million total users — and 46 million monthly active users — who send more than 530 million messages a day.
“Discord is a no-brainer for us,” said Luke Behnke, vice president of product for San Francisco-based Zendesk, in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s a massive platform growing like crazy, and our partners have been asking for it.”
Above: Zendesk help is integrated into Discord.
Based on Zendesk’s initial benchmark data, customers supported via an integrated omnichannel offering experience 31 percent faster first resolution times. For developers, this means gamers can get back to playing the game faster, and for agents, it means they can handle a larger volume of support tickets.
Players can simply type in the a command line “/support” to get help. That’s starts a private message from the gamer to the publisher. The gamer can keep playing.
“We are uniquely suited to meet customers where they are,” Behnke said.
Agents can support customers across any channel they prefer, including email, chat, phone, and self-service channels, as well as popular messaging services like Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, and Apple Business Chat.
Gamers can now open a Zendesk support ticket directly from Discord. Historically, gamers have had to email, call, or reach out on social media for issues like reporting a bug. This would take them away from their game, resulting in poorly executed and fragmented customer experiences.
With the Zendesk Discord integration, gamers can now reach customer service from within the Discord app, creating more efficiency and allowing agents to track, solve, and report customer service issues without interrupting the gaming experience.
”Everything at Discord is focused on how we improve gaming experiences for our superfans, and seamless customer support is a huge part of that,” said Eros Resmini, chief marketing officer at Discord, in a statement. “This Zendesk integration takes advantage valuable real-time communication with customers and allows game makers a modern, more efficient way to support their players. As long time supporters and customers of Zendesk, we’re excited to see gaming communities benefit from integrations like these.”
Zendesk has more than 130,000 paid customer accounts using its customer service platform, which has support in more than 30 languages.
“We are the only platform that can deliver this kind of integration at scale for game publishers,” Behnke said.
