Zendesk and AWS Just Teamed Up to Fix Your Frankenstack

This week on Funnel Frontier: Zendesk + AWS just ended the era of messy contact centers by bringing voice, chat, and AI in one system.
 

This week:

• Zendesk and AWS just teamed up to fix your Frankenstack
• Agentforce is printing revenue, and now sales too

Stat of the Week

46% of businesses find CRM software helpful in centralizing customer data for easy access.​ (CRM.org) 

Zendesk and AWS just teamed up to fix your Frankenstack

If your contact center tech feels like it was assembled during a fire drill… you’re not alone. Voice over here, tickets over there, AI duct-taped on top like a chatbot wearing a trench coat.

Zendesk’s latest deal with AWS wants to change that.

The two signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) at re:Invent 2025, doubling down on their shared mission: kill the clutter, unify the stack, and make AI actually useful (for once).

Oh, and AWS just crowned Zendesk its Customer Experience Partner of the Year, so it’s not a bad time to go all in.

📞 Amazon Connect gets a new bestie

Zendesk is baking Amazon Connect voice into its Resolution Platform, alongside AI-powered sentiment analysis and conversation intelligence. The idea? End the “voice lives on a different planet” problem and finally treat voice, digital, and automation as one cohesive CX galaxy.

And for buyers? The bundled Zendesk + Amazon Connect solution is landing in AWS Marketplace soon, making it easier than ever to deploy both in one go.

🧠 Early signs look good

TELUS Digital tested this combo for a telco client. They saw:

• +5% in first contact resolution
• –50% in after-contact work time

That’s not “AI might help someday.” That’s measurable ROI, right now. Faster answers, fewer follow-ups, and agents who leave the day with brain cells to spare.

💡 What this means for your CX stack

The AI honeymoon is over. Results now matter more than vibes. And most contact centers? Still stuck in tool soup.

This Zendesk–AWS tie-up offers a better blueprint:

• Connect voice and chat in one clean system
• Bake AI into workflows, don’t bolt it on after
• Let agents focus on customers, not tab-switching

Amazon Connect brings the pipes. Zendesk brings the brains. Together? They’re bundling infra and intelligence into one stack—and backing it with real-world results (like 5% higher first contact resolution, 50% faster wrap-up times).

But even if you’re not on Zendesk or AWS, the takeaway’s clear: Stop stacking point solutions. Start designing for flow.

And before adding more AI? Fix the foundation first. Because no amount of automation can clean up a mess of tools that were never meant to work together.

The Week @ CRM.org

CRM Best Practices. Using a CRM properly is like cooking—here’s your recipe for avoiding the mess (with famous company examples!).

CRM for Small Business. Just because your office space is tiny doesn’t mean your customer relationships should be, too.

🌸 Weekly Bloom 🌸 

5 Ways to Create a High-Performance Team. Investors today value a quality team over the founding idea. So ditch the ego and focus on building a dynamic, inclusive group.

Agentforce is printing revenue, and now sales too

Salesforce just dropped two big “agentic enterprise” breadcrumbs—and yep, they connect.

First, the fiscal results flex: Agentforce is now Salesforce’s fastest-growing platform ever, clocking 330% ARR growth YoY and hitting around $500M in ARR on its own. Tie it to Data 360 (the deployment backbone), and the agentic stack is now pulling in $1.4B, up 114% YoY.

That isn’t pilot‑project vanity math. It’s real money from real rollouts. Benioff’s basically saying: “Yeah, this thing escaped the lab.” 

And the proof is in the usage curve—active Agentforce accounts up 70% QoQ, 18,500 deals closed since launch, and 1.5M support requests already handled through agents.

🛍 Then came Cyber Week and it proved the hype

Salesforce’s Cyber Week report showed how agentic CX goes mainstream.

• $336.6B in global sales, up 7% YoY
• $67B directly influenced by AI agents
• 1 in 5 orders touched by agent-driven recommendations or service
• Brands using Agentforce 360 grew 32% faster than peers

Retailers like Pandora, Shark Ninja, Funko shipped agentic results and grew sales 32% faster than peers.

Service agents weren’t just “deflecting.” They were doing real work at scale: AI service chats up 55% WoW, agent actions like returns and address changes up 70%. In other words, the bots weren’t a chatbot coat of paint—they were extra hands during retail hell week.

🧠 So what’s the playbook for everyone else?

Zoom out, and it’s simple: Agentforce is working because it’s out of the lab and into real workflows. Retail is just the loudest proof point.

When shoppers start with AI, get guided by AI, and increasingly transact through AI, the brands with tuned agents win the shelf space inside the algorithm.

Even if you’re not on Salesforce, here’s what the winners are doing:

• Clean your data so agents don’t hallucinate—products, policies, and IDs should be crystal clear
• Pick real jobs for AI: start with high-volume, high-pain tasks (support intake, routing, guided checkout)
• Close the loop early with observability and retraining—because smarter agents = less chaos later

The takeaway? The companies getting ROI from agents aren’t braver, they’re just better instrumented.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Uber opens the vault: new ad platform taps into ride data. Uber just launched “Uber Intelligence,” letting marketers analyze anonymous trip and takeout behavior to target ads. Brands can now identify traveler types and local habits and serve ads in-app or in-car.

Kustomer adds AI Assistants to streamline support and sales. Kustomer has launched AI Assistants to automate pre- and post-sales tasks like FAQs, order tracking, and scheduling. The tools summarize chats, resolve tickets, and trigger workflows, while keeping agents in control.

Snowflake and Anthropic sign $200M deal to scale agentic AI. Claude AI will power agents across Snowflake’s platform, helping enterprises automate CX, sales, and data tasks without leaving their cloud environment.

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