Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences.

Like the perfect storm, 2020 blew in and turned business on its head. And today, business operations, offices, and even customers look quite different. According to a recent McKinsey survey, over 75 percent of customers in the U.S. have tried something new when it comes to how they shop, the services they use, or how they communicate with companies. Many of these changes are likely to stick around long after the pandemic is over.

Many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) rely on a patchwork system of multiple tools just to capture customer information and respond to requests. This can result in time wasted, missed requests and lost sales—not a great look for a growing business. What’s more, these workarounds and stopgaps simply don’t scale. As your business matures, your technology needs to mature too.

The world will keep changing, and now is the time to embrace it. Change can be challenging, of course, but it can also push you to build an even better customer experience, listen to your customers more closely and work harder to stand out from your competition—and these are all good things. One of the ways you can equip your team to embrace change is with a virtual sandbox environment.

According to a recent NPR survey of state health departments, the national coronavirus contact tracing workforce tripled in just six weeks, jumping from 11,142 workers to 37,110—and public health researchers say it needs to grow even more. Recent surges in cases underscore the importance of reopening countries, states, schools, and businesses carefully and as safely as possible—when the time is right.