Zendesk prides itself on being a help desk company that pushes the boundaries of help-desk technology, and earlier this month they added new functionality to their platform with an email marketing integration from Contactology.

North Carolina-based Contactology offers email marketing and online surveying technologies, and the integration with Zendesk’s on-demand product will allow users to manage email marketing campaigns from directly within Zendesk. Contactology has been integrating heavily with platforms in different segments, from CRM with Zoho and Salesforce.com to web analytics with ClickTale. Other integrations are planned for the year, and we’re curious to see if Contactology’s competitors in the email-marketing field decide to jump on the help desk bandwagon, because it is a seemingly unlikely partnership.

Specifically, the result of Zendesk’s collaboration with Contactology is a widget that can be activated by anyone with accounts from both providers, and it can be enabled within a few minutes. Within the Zendesk interface, customer service reps can access a contact’s current email marketing list status, and from there they can add or remove help desk customers to selected distribution lists or opt-ins to receive special offers or newsletters.

This new email marketing widget offers an interesting enhancement to help-desk processes—it’s not critical that companies have email marketing support for their help desk platforms, but if they do have a need for both it’s a convenient addition. Likewise, if companies have disparate help desk and email marketing processes, it probably isn’t imperative that their service reps have access to email marketing information at that very moment, but how nice is it if they do have that information?

This is a new, nuanced facet to the customer-service procedure, and considering how aggressively Contactology has pursued partnerships recently, we’ll likely see more of this kind of improvement.