Zendesk Teams with Tata Consulting to Better Serve Partners

Zendesk is adding muscle behind its customer service and sales CRM platform by unveiling a new partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one designed to help Zendesk grow its business and better serve its channel partners and customers.

The strategic alliance aims to bring Zendesk a wide range of assistance and leverage in the market, including consulting, implementation and optimization services from TCS for Zendesk’s customer service and sales CRM products — particularly for large enterprises. And while the partnership is focused on assisting existing and prospective customers, it’s also seen as a way for Zendesk to continue to invest in and expand its partner business.

Zendesk’s Robert Moreno

“This partnership with TCS is a very important step in Zendesk’s effort to more efficiently solve companies’ increasingly sophisticated technological requirements,” Ricardo Moreno, vice president of worldwide partners for Zendesk, told Channel Futures. “Specifically, this partnership will allow companies to receive solutions consulting for individual product integrations and customizations that will help them deliver better customer experiences.”

Customers around the world prefer to work with partners they know and trust, and the alliance with TCS will work to aid in those relationships, said Moreno.

“Often, customers will be on a journey of larger initiatives, such as digital transformation projects, with Zendesk being a key enabler of that effort. Now, a customer going through that said transformation with TCS can leverage the company’s deep customer knowledge, business expertise and have Zendesk integrated as part of the overall solution.”

For both companies, those objectives will be their focus, he said.

“The goal of this partnership is to provide Zendesk CRM customers with TCS’ deep contextual knowledge and experience in digital transformation, as well as [to] provide TCS customers with our support, sales and engagement software solutions,” added Moreno.

Zendesk’s partner business growth in 2019 was 95% year over year, and the new partnership aims to continue to grow those relationships in the future, he said.

Kate Leggett, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that in the past Zendesk historically has appealed to smaller companies with midsize deployments of the company’s customer service platform products, mostly in the high tens of thousands of users. The new alliance could change that situation for the company, she said.

Forrester Research’s Kate Leggett

“Zendesk is making motions to move into the enterprise with a more robust product offering, exposing platform services and partnerships with global system integrators like TCS who can bring domain expertise and a stellar reputation of implementation and business transformation,” said Leggett. “TCS has strong business process consulting and technology implementation experience, especially for projects having a custom development focus.”

Ultimately, the partnership will show Zendesk how to work with a global system integrator and that knowledge and partnership will be extended to others, she said.

“Having TCS behind Zendesk is a seal of endorsement that Zendesk’s solution is enterprise-ready and being supported by this global systems integrator,” said Leggett. That could help make Zendesk more attractive to potential customers and new channel partners, “especially to clients who are larger and have deep relationships with system integrators.”

The new alliance is positive evidence that Zendesk is making a concerted effort to move up market, she said.

“By partnering with a major global consulting company, this is the next step in Zendesk’s effort to more efficiently solve companies’ increasingly complex technological requirements and provide powerful CRM custom solutions and integrations for customers worldwide.”