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A loyal customer may well be the best kind there is. Loyal customers come back to one particular business when its services are needed, forsaking all others, and that means a fairly reliable income stream.

Protecting the loyal customer is therefore deeply important to the business, and Zendesk may have just the thing to do that with a new line of embeddable technology.

Perhaps one of the best ways to ensure customer loyalty is to address problems quickly. Problems are nearly inevitable in any human-made system; something will go wrong somewhere. But most mobile apps—quickly becoming the weapon of choice for customers interfacing with a brand—don't address problems quickly, instead routing a customer to a website or a phone number. Zendesk, however, looks to improve on this by offering a solution that can be embedded in an app, allowing things like live chat services and even frequently asked questions systems to be added.

Zendesk already counts major operations like Expedia (News - Alert) among its customer base, so it's clear that Zendesk knows from where it speaks. Zendesk's senior manager for international communications, Andy Sommer, offered up some comment on the release, noting that customers with issues just wanted to get those issues solved, and quickly. One of the biggest trends in customer service, Sommer noted, is to “reduce effort.” An embedded option delivers that lowered effort by routing fixes through the app in use instead of handing off the problem elsewhere. Better yet, it not only makes for a better experience for customers, but it also cuts down on the number of inbound calls for call centers to handle, meaning fewer resources need be expended there.

Zendesk has been working toward this particular goal for some time; last year, the company bought Zopim, a live chat specialist firm out of Singapore, and allowed Zendesk to integrate with Facebook (News - Alert)'s Business on Messenger Live Chat system, That improved the ability to make contact and even opened up the possibility of making purchases from the Like buttons on Facebook, something a couple firms are reportedly trying now.

With customer time at a premium these days, it's not surprising that customers are eager to do more with less. A system like Zendesk's should go a long way toward reducing the amount of time that customers need to spend. If customers recognize that a company's efforts are allowing more to be done with less time that should in turn increase the likelihood that the customer will come back in the future. It's not a magic bullet, of course, but the more the customer realizes that dealing with such a company saves time, effort and headache, the more the chances of return business increase.

Return business is vital for many companies out there, and whether it's selling insurance, plane tickets or sandwiches, the loyal customer is the best customer to have. Tools like Zendesk's can help make the difference between the one-off buyer and the customer who comes back for more, but it's just a help. There's a lot of other points that go into the making of a loyal customer, but starting with Zendesk's tool set can go a long way.