Unlocking the power of AI across the entire service organization
Customer Service Under Pressure
Customer service has reached a tipping point, where AI has the potential to revolutionize how companies engage with customers. With innovations in accessible AI, machine learning and Large Language Models, a plethora of new AI applications are changing the ecosystem of customer experience solutions. Your customers have caught on: 71% say AI helps them get faster answers. At the same time, it’s getting harder to give customers the experience they expect. You’re being asked to ramp up productivity while keeping costs down – and managing high ticket volumes amidst economic uncertainty. Customer service teams need tools that free agents from repetitive tasks, so they can be more productive and focus on high-value conversations that really need a human touch, while customers get the opportunity to find answers on their own without needing to open tickets.
“At a time of sky-high customer expectations, staffing shortages, and economic uncertainty, AI helps customer service teams scale — and stay nimble. ”
How AI Helps Customer Service Teams
AI is an ideal solution for current challenges, providing agility, resilience, and scale to pressured customer service teams. It enhances efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and allocating human resources where they are most needed. AI-powered insights enable agents and admins to understand customers better and identify optimal solutions to issues, leading to significant time and effort savings. However, the right AI has often been inaccessible due to the slow, expensive nature of many market solutions.
These require substantial IT investment, lengthy implementation, and specialized resources. Some are incomplete, designed for narrow aspects of your CX, leading to customer frustration with inefficient bots. Consequently, most CX leaders report their AI plans as ad hoc rather than strategic. AI built for CX is just that – leveraging Machine Learning (ML) models trained to understand user intent, or Large Language Models (LLM) with generative capabilities to create scalable, personalized customer experiences. Generative AI makes it possible to have more natural conversations and accurate communication with customers – a feature now built into Zendesk AI. In this guide, we will cover Zendesk AI and the powerful new features that go in to creating intelligent CX.
AI is the perfect solution for today’s challenges. For customer service teams under pressure, AI offers agility, resilience, and scale.
60% of customers say they now have higher standards for customer service
81% of service teams expect ticket volume to increase over the next 12 months
70% of agents don’t feel empowered to do their jobs well
Powerful AI Within Reach
Zendesk is making AI accessible to small startups, large enterprises, and everyone in between. AI is traditionally very complex, but at Zendesk we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve created a solution that’s ready to use right off the shelf, so service teams get value immediately. Conventional AI solutions provide a technical platform that businesses can use to train AI models and embed them in their software. Take, for instance, an e-commerce company that wants to recognize and automate common issues like refunds, order status, and return requests. In the past, the company would identify 50 to 100 examples of each type of request, and use those to train the AI model, which can be a painstaking process.
With Zendesk AI, we do the heavy lifting. Common customer requests within a vertical such as e-commerce look pretty much the same from company to company. At Zendesk, we have hundreds of thousands of examples of these requests, as well as expertise in identifying them through intent recognition, language detection, and sentiment analysis. We’ve used this trove of data to train the AI models ourselves, so service teams don’t have to bear that burden.
By embedding that aggregated knowledge in our products in a beautiful, simple way, customer service teams don’t need to invest in technical experts to take advantage of AI. There’s no coding and no developers required. Zendesk AI works out of the box. You just toggle it on, and it starts working in a matter of minutes, not months. That’s a gamechanger for customer service teams.
What Makes Zendesk AI Different
Our AI is a game-changer for customer service teams. It’s built on our own aggregate knowledge, integrated with our products in a beautiful, simple way. You toggle it on, and it starts working in a matter of minutes, not months. That’s a game-changer for customer service teams.
Accessible to anyone | Powerful AI that’s ready to go in minutes. No need for developers, heavy IT spend, or months of lead time.
Built and trained on the best CX data | Based on billions of data points from actual customer interactions, solving your real-world CX challenges.
Designed for the entire service experience
| Making it easy for everyone engaging with or providing support to be more efficient and productive in every task they do.
Transparent and trustworthy | Giving levels of granularity and control that give businesses flexibility to apply AI exactly how they want to.
Connecting the AI dots, from bots to knowledge management
Zendesk AI is an intelligent layer that sits on top of your CX solution and generates insights to make your business more efficient. The combined power of AI with human support helps customer service teams work smarter. Agents and admins are supercharged to handle tasks like deflection, triage, intelligent workflows, and knowledge management more efficiently. With Generative AI for bots, you can deliver accurate, conversational responses to customer questions based on knowledge base material. In the knowledge base, Generative AI accelerates content production to streamline creation, while Generative AI for agents allows them to summarize tickets and save time crafting responses.
Better Bots | Bots are a support agent’s best friend. They’re extremely effective at taking repetitive questions and tasks — like password resets and refund requests — off a service team’s plate, enabling agents to focus on highervalue conversations. Bots powered by Zendesk are easy to set up and deploy across all messaging channels, and they’re also easy to customize and change on the fly. Now with Zendesk AI, bots are even more powerful and easy to set up the bot interacts with your customers in a way that makes most sense for your business.
Generative AI for Bots | Generative replies uses knowledge from the your help center to quickly craft accurate, conversational responses for your customers.
Bot Persona | Build your bots’ personality, making it friendly, formal or playful when responding to customers in order to maintain a consistent level of service across channels
Advanced Bots | Intelligent bots for messaging and email that leverage the most extensive database of customer intents, specific to CX teams in your industry for more personalized and accurate responses, higher agent productivity, and faster setup. Comes with insightful tools that give admins recommendations on what they need to automate.
Intelligent Workflows | As customers engage with bots and submit questions across channels, intelligent triage automatically classifies and categorizes incoming customer conversations based on their intent, sentiment, and language. Utilize custom intents by changing their label names to match your organization’s taxonomy. You can also tailor Zendesk by editing intent labels to align with your unique needs as a business. This allows support teams to automatically prioritize and route those issues to the right agent. Zendesk AI also integrates with your CRM to gather the context from customer conversations, so agents have all the relevant information at their fingertips to jump in and help.
Intelligence in the context panel | surfaces these AI-powered customer insights in the agent’s workspace and suggests the relevant responses to apply to solve the customer’s issue. Additionally, similar tickets lets agents maintain service consistency. This puts agents on the fastest and most efficient path to resolution. You can equip contextually similar tickets for quicker and consistent resolutions, even streamlining agent onboarding by offering contextual guidance for next steps.
Generative AI for Agents | allows you summarize ticket content for quick summaries, saving time between escalations. It’s also possible to automatically change the tone of responses and expand a short answers into longer, more polished response. On average, these features save upwards 45 seconds per ticket, which can add up to hours saved.
Higher productivity, agility, and customer satisfaction
Zendesk AI allows companies to scale their customer service without compromising on quality so that everybody wins: customers get immediate responses to their common requests, agents are freed up to focus on complex tasks, and businesses become more productive and agile.
AI boosts productivity by identifying manual work that can (and should) be automated, and letting agents handle requests that really need the human touch. At most companies, 50 to 70 percent of customer service requests are driven by just 20 to 30 topics. Using real-time intelligence to understand and automate responses to those topics helps businesses be as efficient as possible. Plus valuable insights allows you to focus your efforts on things that matter.
Zendesk AI enables businesses to be more agile and resilient, especially in times of volatility or peak demand. By automating away common issues and removing that burden from their agents, service teams can adapt to sudden changes in ticket volumes and operate more effectively across their entire organization. Zendesk AI’s deflection and agent support also helps businesses on board and train new agents faster — a big advantage for teams facing staffing and hiring challenges.
The job of an agent can be very stressful. Zendesk AI makes their life a lot easier by shielding them from repetitive requests, helping them solve customer issues quickly, more effectively and with less effort. Agents feel less overwhelmed and are freed up to tackle more complex, meaningful work — with a direct impact on job satisfaction and retention.
AI elevates the customer experience. People want fast, effective support on every channel, from bots and agents alike. Feeling heard and seen has a direct impact on how customers perceive your brand – and whether or not they come back. More than 80 percent of customers say a positive service experience increases the likelihood they’ll make another purchase.
“At most companies, 50 to 70 percent of customer service requests are driven by just 20 to 30 topics. Using real-time intelligence to understand and automate responses to those topics helps businesses be as efficient as possible.”
Insights To Fuel Growth
With Zendesk AI, customer service teams can focus on creating value rather than just keeping the lights on. Real-time intelligence creates a new and valuable source of insights that enables service leaders to work proactively to address operational issues across the customer service ecosystem and the business as a whole.
AI empowers customer service leaders to be proactive by helping them prioritize and respond to business-critical issues. Consider an e-commerce service team that notices an uptick in the number of customers contacting support because they can’t complete a transaction. By using AI-powered insights to prioritize those tickets and resolve the problem quickly, the service team has a positive impact on the customer experience as well as the company’s revenue. Moreover, intent suggestions support further prioritization of automated workflow to manage the same issue in the future, the service team helps the business improve its efficiency and customer experience. More conversations mean the AI gets smarter, which will have even more benefits in the long run. This is a new approach — a new vision for AI for customer service teams. At Zendesk, we believe AI should be accessible to everyone. It’s easier than ever before to implement and start seeing great results. We know exactly where customer service teams can drive value, and we’re excited to show you the way with AI.