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Article 5 min read

The next frontier in AI: Zendesk’s complete service solution

By Lisa Kant, Senior Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Last updated October 9, 2024

A cursor hovering over the Zendesk AI auto assist button.

Successful adoption of AI will create the biggest chasm between companies that become the disruptors vs. disrupted in the next five years. For many businesses, AI has yet to deliver the results they were hoping for. At Zendesk, we know it is possible to achieve ROI from AI today because we are seeing it with our customers like Lush, Ingram Micro, Conservice, Tesco, and so many more, who are leveraging our complete service solution for the AI era. Our industry-leading solution is designed to help customers of all sizes and industries realize a material return on their investment. And now we are excited to take that one step further with the latest innovations made available at the Zendesk AI Summit—including new omnichannel AI agents; our new AI agent builder; enhanced agent copilot; and AI for voice—all designed to deliver exceptional service in a way that is easy-to-use, scale, and drive meaningful business results.

Achieve +80% automation with our new omnichannel AI agents

While customers increasingly expect fast, accurate, and personalized service, many businesses still rely heavily on traditional channels like voice and email to engage with their customers. That’s why Zendesk is making AI agents ​​available on all channels ensuring that these autonomous bots can work independently or alongside human agents in resolving customer issues. Our new omnichannel AI agents autonomously resolve up to 80% of interactions with human-level accuracy and quality. Unlike traditional bots that require extensive training and data uploads, Zendesk’s AI agents are also ready to deploy the same day. Simply describe your automation use case, and achieve over 80% accuracy from the start.

With omnichannel AI agents, companies can now:

  • Create and control AI agents using our 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.

  • Deliver instant, accurate responses with generative replies and address more sophisticated issues end-to-end with customizable conversation flows, now extending to email.

  • Automate up to 50% of voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support.

Esusu, a financial services company that helps renters improve their credit scores, quickly transformed their CX operations with Zendesk’s AI agents. Using our new AI agent builder, they deployed their AI agents in their primary channel—email—in just one day. By automating 64% of their email interactions, they not only eased the workload for their agents but also increased their customer satisfaction score by 10 points.

AI agents

Empower teams with the new enhanced Zendesk agent copilot

While automation can handle up to +80% of interactions, human agents remain essential for managing complex, high-value requests that require empathy and timely resolutions. To support this, we’ve enhanced Zendesk’s agent copilot with powerful new capabilities to help deliver consistent, high-quality service across every interaction. Unlike other copilots that are bolted-on, Zendesk’s agent copilot is a deeply embedded assistant that proactively guides your teams, agents and internal teams, to resolution. Zendesk agent copilot is now available to all customers using Zendesk AI.

With our enhanced agent copilot, your teams can rely on copilot to:

  • Anticipate customer needs, offer proactive recommendations, and take actions autonomously with the now widely available “auto assist” mode.

  • Follow specific processes on behalf of an agent and instantly sync changes to ensure agents are always following the latest procedures with new copilot procedures.

  • 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.

Rotho, a leading European manufacturer, empowers their teams with Zendesk’s agent copilot to efficiently manage peak ticket volumes. By using copilot in auto assist mode, Rotho’s agents tripled their productivity, handling up to 120 tickets in a shift—up from 40. This not only boosted efficiency, but transformed the way their agents work.

Agent copilot

Unlock real-time insights and quality assurance with Zendesk AI

For years, business leaders have turned to customer service for insights, but the most valuable information – locked in long emails, chat transcripts, and phone calls – has traditionally been expensive and time-consuming to extract. To help with this, Zendesk is introducing AI-powered insights that analyze customer conversations across systems, extract valuable key insights, and enable real-time business intelligence – such as strategic opportunities that can be applied across teams – to inform changes needed to improve CX and increase CSAT.

With Zendesk AI-driven insights, companies can now:

  • Quickly uncover why customers are reaching out with granular details through enhanced intents and entity detection, enabling faster and more personalized resolutions.

  • 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.

  • Use Quality Assurance across every touchpoint, now including voice and AI agents to automatically analyze and optimize customer conversations and agent performance.

UrbanStems, an online flower delivery service, leverages Zendesk’s intelligent triage to automatically identify root issues and efficiently escalate urgent tickets. By using AI-driven insights, they streamlined operations, saving time and boosting efficiency. Within just three months, UrbanStems saved $100K and saw a marked improvement in customer satisfaction. “Zendesk AI has been critical to our business,” says Laura McDonald, Director of Customer Happiness. “We’ve already seen huge returns.”

AI insights

Get started today

With our latest innovations in AI, alongside new analytics and voice capabilities, Zendesk is truly transforming the way service is delivered. These advancements aren’t just theoretical—they’re driving real, measurable impact across every aspect of the customer experience. From reducing costs to boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty, Zendesk is helping businesses achieve meaningful, tangible results today.

Ready to see what Zendesk AI can do for your business?

Join us at our Zendesk AI Summit digital event taking place on October 15th and 16th, featuring Adam Grant and Stephanie Mehta who will share their visions for AI and the future of work, deep-dive into these latest releases and get your questions answered during our live Ask the Experts panel.

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