Zendesk’s new community product Gather delivers for the gaming industry

The inner workings of millennial esports fans and online gaming communities have been an elusive, untapped market, but all this is set to change with the launch of Zendesk’s new community product, Gather.

Over the last decade, the gaming industry has been at the vanguard of online innovation, adopting the latest technologies and advancing new sectors such as esports, live casinos and more. However, traditional customer service tools have struggled to keep pace with the needs of the digital native generation. Zendesk’s powerful new product, Gather, is already delivering results in the online gaming community by creating a space where customers can engage with each other and experts and offer guidance and insight beyond what a single customer support agent can handle.

Adrian McDermott, President of Products for Zendesk, explained: “Gather is a community product, which allows businesses that use Zendesk to bring their customers together to share information, connect and collaborate with a shared purpose. It’s all about harnessing the power of customer conversations.”

“There’s a benefit to understanding the conversations between customers and customer support agents, but it’s also important to listen to the conversations happening among users themselves,” he added. “The Internet has built incredibly powerful digital communities. We launched Gather to help companies enhance these communities.”

Zendesk has seen significant traction specifically with communities in the gaming and esports world. In particular, the all-in-one voice and text chat for gamers, Discord, uses Gather to improve community engagement and brand loyalty by tracking key interactions and endorsements from leading esports leagues, twitch streamers, and individual players.

Discord is a platform for gamers who are very vocal about their specific needs and desires. Using their community, the company is able to understand the needs of their players and uncover the most requested features. At the same time, Discord uses Gather to turn feedback directly into features on their roadmap in an effort to bolster its product management. For example, 50% of the most requested features they’ve heard from the community have been delivered.

“This goes way beyond ‘how do I change my password?’ These communities become a destination where people can really engage with a product,” said McDermott. “It’s a powerful way to engage with customers and build a great reputation for the brand.”

Gather is a direct extension of Zendesk’s goal to provide the tools for companies to build the best possible customer experiences.

“The brands that are most successful and memorable today are the companies that have rallied around the customer experience. If you think about Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and many of our other customers, it goes beyond customer service and support and extends to putting the customer at the center of the business. The customer experience is at the heart of innovation and tools like Gather that enable a better customer experience are helping companies grow and scale,” concluded McDermott.

More information on Gather can be found here.