At its flagship global conference, Relate, Zendesk, Inc. introduced Zendesk AI, an intelligence layer that makes personalized, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences (CX) accessible for all companies. The new offering combines decades of Zendesk’s unique data and insights with new AI technologies, including the company’s proprietary models, as well as large language models (LLMs).
Zendesk AI will help companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create seamless interactions. The solution continues to learn over time, is fast to deploy, easy to use, and immediately adds value without the need for large teams of developers or months of implementation time.
“More than 90% of our customers already use AI within Zendesk, and we are building on this great foundation with new solutions that any business can use immediately,” said Tom Eggemeier, CEO, Zendesk. “AI has significant benefits for agents, admins and businesses that want to deliver the best customer experience, and Zendesk AI will help them instantly see tangible value in cost savings and thousands of hours a month in gained productivity.”
According to the 2023 Zendesk CX Trends Report, customers have high expectations for AI; however, business leaders said their organizations have yet to achieve cost savings and improved efficiency. Zendesk AI allows companies to instantly infuse intelligence into every part of the service experience, resulting in smarter conversations that quickly resolve issues.
Built on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset, Zendesk AI continuously learns from every customer interaction and allows companies to better assist customers. By eliminating the work of manually assigning and routing inquiries, leaders can free up team capacity and reduce operating expenses. Additionally, by automatically solving more customer queries (especially during periods of high demand), businesses are in a better position to contain costs.
New capabilities announced today include:
● Advanced bots: Enhanced, pre-trained bots for messaging and email automatically solve issues and leverage the most extensive database of customer intents for more personalized, industry-specific and accurate responses.
● Agent assistance: AI-powered insights and suggestions improve agent productivity by allowing agents to quickly solve customer issues and use AI-generated content to respond faster, with proper context.
● Intelligent triage: Uses intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis to create powerful intelligent workflows that get smarter over time, classify incoming customer requests and allow teams to power workflows based on these insights.
In addition, Zendesk recently announced a partnership with OpenAI and today, unveiled new features that leverage the power of generative AI. This includes response rephrasing and tone shift, which helps agents craft clearer and thoughtful responses to customers. These updates save substantive time and effort for agents.
“While running and scaling a successful CX team is complex, using AI should be simple,” said Cristina Fonseca, Head of AI, Zendesk. “With Zendesk AI, our proprietary models are specifically trained for CX and designed to immediately deliver actionable customer insights. These foundational features are key to improving customer service quality and agent efficiency, with potential to be even more powerful when combined with LLMs.”