Zendesk收购个性化客户营销工具Outbound.io，进一步优化客户服务平台5月5日报道 （编译：叶展盛）
在过去几年里，Zendesk已经为公司推出了不少工具和服务，帮助他们和客户进行互动，但这些工具和服务最后都出了问题。去年10月，Zendesk推出了一项服务帮助企业预测潜在的问题。本周四，这家公司收购了个性化客户营销工具Outbound.io，以优化该客户服务平台。
Outbound.io由雀巢资深软件工程师Dhruvkaran Mehta和Josh Weissburg成立于2013年，这家公司能通过短信、电子邮件、网页端和手机推送帮助品牌给客户发送信息。Outbound.io毕业于Y Combinator孵化器，这次收购中，整支团队都会被并入Zendesk，而这家公司也会成为Zendesk的一大产品。本次收购的具体金额尚未公开。
Zendesk的产品副总裁Adrian McDermott解释道：“通过这次收购，我们会把Outbound‘短信要简约而不简单’的哲学融入到Zendesk中，通过更直观的软件体验，帮助公司和客户建立可靠且可持续的关系。”
在2016年的一次采访中，Zendesk的首席执政官Mikkel Svane告诉外媒，客户服务正在从“如何支持你的客户，如何回答他们的问题”向“如何维持客户关系，并借此推广你的品牌”转变。过去几年里，Zendesk一直停留在前一阶段。
Zendesk一直想要为公司提供一种工具去管理整个客户生命周期（从发现客户到产品购买，再到售后支持）。“作为一家多产品公司，我们想要让用户在任何时候都能得到他们需要的工具。客户体验和客户支持之间的关系还很模糊，Zendesk产品的注意力开始转变，它能根据客户与一家公司的关系，从而更高效、更可靠地帮助公司向其客户做出回应。”
Outbound对于Zendesk的未来发展至关重要，前者将与Zendesk的Connect产品结合，其中Connect能对客户进行分类，并发送手机推送进行客户互动。同时Outbound的客户也会被保留下来。
McDermott表示Zendesk将推出Outbound的一些功能，包括客户历史记录、客户划分、多渠道信息发送、广告测试、数据分析以及Bring Your Own Provider功能，这项功能能帮助品牌整合第三方服务，例如MailGun、SendGrid和Mandrill等。
先前Outbound的融资总额已达到207万美元，投资方包括Y Combinator、Subtraction Capital和Lunch Van Fund。
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Outbound
2017年05月06日
Outbound
Outbound：帮助企业通过电子邮件和移动设备向客户发消息
随着移动革命的来临，无论客户身处何地，企业都需要与他们建立联系，这便需要企业在电子邮件之外寻找一种新的营销手段。Outbound 是一家获得 Y Combinator 投资的创业公司，希望可以帮助营销人员开展新形式的营销活动，而不是仅限于“打开页面和点击链接”。为此，Outbound 将帮助营销人员借助于专门针对移动设备优化的手段，比如说推送通知、短信、甚至是应用内消息，最终与客户建立联系。
Outbound 的联合创始人 德鲁维卡兰·梅赫塔（Dhruvkaran Mehta）和 乔什·维斯伯格（Josh Weissburg）在实际的工作中曾遭遇过上述问题。两人此前在一家名为 Getaround 的汽车分享公司共事，维斯伯格专注于解决与用户互动的问题，而梅赫塔则作为工程师参与推动用户增长的项目。
维斯伯格解释说，他在 Getaround 面临的一大挑战是，如何说服在 Getaround 注册的车主完成创建个人简介的过程。由于步骤十分复杂，有些车主留下的信息并不全面。在这种情况下，他需要与这些客户取得联系，无论他们当时身处何方——无论在网上或是在外办事——鼓励他们采取下一步行动，完成个人简介的创建过程。
据维斯伯格介绍，创建这种针对性营销活动，与各行各业的客户建立接触，从工程学角度讲是一件非常痛苦的事情。但正是由于这种经历，维斯伯格和梅赫塔才有了开发一款新产品的想法，让非技术人员（如市场营销人员）更轻松地发出针对性消息，然后了解哪些消息管用，哪些消息不管用。
2013 年夏天，两人开始打造一项服务（即 Outbound 的前身），不仅允许营销人员实现营销活动自动化，而且还能基于具体的触发机制向用户发送信息，同时还针对自身和控制组发起多个营销测试活动。
梅赫塔解释说：“随着企业意识到人们向移动设备的转移，而他们的大部分收入也来自于移动领域，他们必须要开始与这些受众进行互动，让这些人总是留在自己的移动产品上。但现实情况是，许多适用于电子邮件的技术真的不适合推送通知…我们认为，从根本上讲，即便发送的消息数量更少，但只要质量更高，企业仍可以赚到更多钱。”
这就是说，企业需要一种解决方案，这种方案不仅在有关营销自动化的问题上，将移动当作“一等公民”，而且还能帮助企业发现哪种是覆盖这些受众的最佳方案，然后分析他们的任务是否得到满足。
例如，使用 Outbound 服务的企业不需要让客户打开电子邮件并点击链接，而是试图让客户填写完整的个人简介，增加支付信息，完成注册流程，填写缺失的信息，对帐号进行升级等等。
有了 Outbound 的服务，营销部门人员就不需要坐下来就创建消息平台的问题，与公司工程团队进行长时间讨论，或是诉诸于昂贵的营销自动化软件——这种软件也不能满足他们多渠道战略的需要。相反，营销人员可以上网登录 Outbound 的网站，立即开始创建他们想要的营销活动，填写相关信息，包括他们希望用户做什么以获得回报，以及希望以哪种方式（如推送、电子邮件和短信）与这些用户建立联系。
在举办了营销活动以后，营销人员还可以在 Outbound 网站上实时了解活动效果，以及追踪历史数据和趋势。
Outbound 在 2014 年夏天最早推出了这种服务，但当时它更多专注于渠道消息。今年早些时候，Outbound 进一步扩大了服务范围，开始支持更复杂的逻辑和 A/B 测试。根据客户规模的不同，Outbound 的服务价格最低为每个月 149 美元（向 2000 活跃用户发信息），最高为每个月 899 美元（向 3 万活跃用户发信息）。（Outbound 的服务价格根据客户需要送达信息的活跃用户数量而定，而不是基于发送的消息条数。）
到目前为止，Outbound 已与 16 家公司建立了合作，其客户的业务主要涉及教育、金融服务和卫生保健等领域，其中包括 HealthLoop、uBiome、eTherapi、GetSmarter 和 Omada Health 等公司。
Outbound 总部设在旧金山，目前获得了 150 万美元的融资，除了 Y Combinator，投资方还包括 Subtraction Capital 的保罗·威拉德（Paul Willard）、InterWest Partners 的道格·佩珀（Doug Pepper）、Correlation Ventures 的特雷沃·基恩兹勒（Trevor Kienzle）以及 YCombinator 的加里·谭（Garry Tan）和亚历克西斯·欧海宁 （Alexis Ohanian）等。
YC-Backed Outbound Helps Businesses Message Customers Over Both Email And Mobile
With the shift to mobile devices, businesses today have a need to reach their customers wherever they are – and that includes marketing to their customers outside of email alone. A Y Combinator-backed startup called Outbound wants to help today’s marketers run campaigns that go beyond just tracking “opens and clicks,” and can also reach customers using mobile-friendly channels like push notifications, SMS and even in-app messages.
The problem is something with which Outbound’s co-founders, Dhruvkaran Mehta and Josh Weissburg, are personally familiar. The two previously worked together at the car-sharing companyGetaround, where Weissburg was focused on activation and Mehta was the engineer who worked on growth alongside him.
At Getaround, one of the challenges Weissburg faced was getting car owners who were listing their vehicles on the service to finish the process of creating their profile, he explains. People would get stuck on different steps and would just drop off. He then needed to be able to reach these particular customers wherever they were at the time – on the web or on mobile, for example – and encourage them to take the next action needed to complete the process.
Setting up these targeted campaigns to reach the customers in question across the various channels was a huge pain on the engineering side, says Weissburg. But the experience gave them the idea to build a product that would make it easier for non-technical people – like marketers – to more easily send out these sorts messages, and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
In summer 2013, the two began building what has now become Outbound, a service that not only lets marketers automate campaigns and send out messages to users based on specific triggers, but also test multiple campaigns against each other and a control group, among other things.
“As businesses realize that populations are moving mobile and most of their revenue is coming from there, they need to start engaging those audiences and keep people coming back to their mobile properties,” Mehta explains. “But what happens is that a lot of the techniques that apply to email are not really applicable to push notifications…We believe, fundamentally, that companies can make more money by sending fewer, but better messages,” he adds.
That is, the businesses need a solution that not only treats mobile as a first-class citizen when it comes to marketing automation, but also helps the business figure out what’s the best means of reaching those customers and then measuring if their goals were met.
Instead of just getting customers to open an email and click a link, for example, a business using Outbound may be trying to get users to complete a profile, add payment information, finish a sign-up process, fill in missing information, upgrade an account, and so on.
With Outbound’s service, marketers don’t have to sit down and have lengthy conversations with their company’s engineering team to build out their messaging platform, or turn to sometimes expensive marketing automation software that can fail to address their need for a multi-channel strategy. Instead, marketers can go online to Outbound’s website to start immediately creating their desired campaign, including information like what user actions will kick it off, what they want users to do in return, and how (e.g. push, email, SMS) they want to reach those users.
The service then returns a “to do” list customers can bring to their developers that tells them the exact API calls to make. Or, in the case of those who are already sending their data to the online hub at Segment.com, using Outbound is only a matter of toggling a switch to turn it on.
After the campaigns are running, marketers can watch the results in real-time on Outbound’s online dashboard, as well as track historical data and trends.
The company first launched its service publicly in summer 2014, at which time it was focused more on funnel messages. Earlier this year, however, it expanded to include support for more sophisticated logic and A/B testing. Pricing for the service ranges from $149/month (2,000 active users) to $899/month (30,000 users) depending on company size. (The pricing is based on the number of active users being messaged, but not how many messages are sent out.)
Today, Outbound is working with 16 companies including those in the educational space, financial services, and healthcare in particular. Some of its customers include HealthLoop, uBiome, eTherapi, GetSmarter, and Omada Health, to name a few.
San Francisco-based Outbound is backed by $1.5 million in funding from Y Combinator, Paul Willard of Subtraction Capital, Doug Pepper of InterWest Partners, Trevor Kienzle from Correlation Ventures, plus YC’s Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian.
Outbound
Outbound
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