Zendesk builds on complete service solution to strengthen partnership between humans and AI

On October 9, 2024, Zendesk launched a range of innovations, featuring AI-powered agents for omnichannel support, an enhanced agent copilot, advanced voice capabilities, and an agent builder. By leading the way in AI-driven customer and employee experiences with its comprehensive service solution, Zendesk's new features enable companies to provide outstanding service that is user-friendly, scalable, and effective in achieving significant business results.

“AI is now bridging the gap between high quality service, at a lower cost, while delivering much more personalized experiences,” said Tom Eggemeier, CEO, Zendesk, noting 73% of consumers believe AI improves the quality of customer service. “Our latest innovations, including voice AI, assist human agents in working efficiently alongside AI to deliver tailored, efficient service. This partnership leads to faster issue resolution, higher customer satisfaction and provides valuable business insights.”

“With Zendesk, we’ve seen a major increase in agent productivity, with nearly double productivity gains in key markets like France while achieving increased customer satisfaction,” said Steve Franklin, Head of Global Operations, Siemens Financial Services. “As AI agents handle basic requests and populate tickets with data, our human agents are freed up to focus on value-added customer interactions. This is all critical to providing a holistic and streamlined customer journey, powered by AI.”

Combined power of AI and human agents elevate CX – across all digital channels

Zendesk is now offering AI agents across every channel, including voice, allowing these autonomous bots to operate independently or collaborate with human agents to resolve customer issues. Additionally, the company has launched a new AI agent builder that simplifies the process for businesses to create AI agents and incorporate controls.

As the industry transitions to fully automated interactions, these new features for Zendesk's AI agents enable companies to fully leverage the advantages of AI by:

1. Delivering instant, accurate responses with generative replies and address more sophisticated issues with customizable conversation flows, now extended to email.
2. Automating up to 50% of voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support across channels.
3. Creating and controlling AI agents using a new AI agent builder, requiring zero training and offering full customization – such as adjusting the brand’s tone – while reducing the time to build, deploy, and maintain.

Improved autonomy and proactivity for enhanced agent copilot

Zendesk is improving its agent copilot with robust features that are accessible to all companies, ensuring the delivery of consistent, high-quality service. In more intricate, high-value interactions between human agents and customers, the agent copilot is now capable of:

1. Anticipate customer needs, offer proactive recommendations, and take actions autonomously with the now widely available “auto assist” mode.
2. Follow specific processes on behalf of an agent and instantly sync changes to ensure agents are always following the latest procedures with the new copilot business procedures.
3. Surface relevant issues and proactive insights – such as similar resolutions – directly within the new AI-powered workspace, ensuring all tools are easily discoverable and keeping workflows uninterrupted.

As part of the upgrades, the agent copilot for voice now offers immediate call insights, including customer sentiment and intent, and quickly retrieves answers from the knowledge base. This enables companies to provide quicker, personalized service to customers who call in with complex, high-value issues that need human support.

Supercharged insights provide valuable and actionable business intelligence for CX teams

Zendesk is launching additional AI-powered insights to analyze customer conversations across various systems, extract valuable key insights, and provide real-time business intelligence. By highlighting strategic opportunities, leaders can implement changes across teams to enhance customer experience (CX), which can subsequently lead to improved customer satisfaction (CSAT).

With these enhanced AI-driven insights, companies can now:

1. Quickly uncover why customers are reaching out with granular details through enhanced intents and entity detection, enabling faster and more personalized resolutions.
2. Proactively design and refine workflows using out-of-the-box insights from the new intelligent triage dashboard, ensuring critical issues are efficiently routed and automated.
3. Use Quality Assurance across every touchpoint, now including voice and AI agents to automatically analyze and optimize customer conversations and agent performance.

“It is critical for the CX industry to continue iterating on how to best leverage AI to supercharge the customer experience,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director, The Futurum Group. “We see how across the board – agents to admins to CX leaders – teams are using technology to better serve customers and employees. Zendesk is providing powerful AI capabilities enabling companies to resolve issues faster, at higher volumes, with the right level of human involvement, and at a higher quality that translates to real ROI.”