The data continues to prove that customers prefer to self-serve (being able to check in for a flight straight from the app – yes, please!). To keep pace with rising expectations for seamless, convenient customer experiences (CX), businesses can take self-service one step further with AI. Businesses can leverage AI as the “always on” tool in the customer journey, and with generative AI, the technology is becoming even more powerful and impactful.
Hear directly from Zendesk customers about what’s changed and what hasn’t when it comes to knowledge management and combining AI with live agent support.
“Self-service doesn’t just mean avoiding human contact—it suggests a smooth, low-effort, frictionless experience provided by thoroughly curated content and strong product or membership database integrations.” – Zendesk customer, Software industry
Expanding Self-Service to CX and Beyond
The application of AI is expected to continue shifting the nature of work that CX teams do, decreasing repetitive tasks or information lookup. Looking forward, the impact is even broader. The ability to analyze sentiment, highlight product issues, and leverage AI to preemptively resolve problems will be valuable for businesses with a wide product range and varying complexity levels.
“At our company, there’s an increasing reliance on AI for quality assurance and trend identification which can be leveraged by other departments like marketing.” – Zendesk customer, Healthcare industry
Keeping Up with Knowledge Management
A point our customers agreed on: the role of agents is evolving—they not only deal directly with customers but also contribute to knowledge management, continually enhancing the self-service base. Agents will be armed with data from customer interactions to dictate the updates and improvements to the self-service offering as well as implementing AI and bots for internal agent support to help them more efficiently solve customer queries.
“We focus on a lot of automation and AI with our agents. How can we use AI to give all the right information to our agents to solve a request then create content in the help center for others, so they can solve their problem quicker.” – Zendesk customer, Healthcare industry
Acknowledging User Preference
There’s a strong demand for tailored content for self-service, and the use of various formats (articles, widgets, videos) to cater to different user preferences for absorbing content. It’s important to remember, some customers are still in favor of human-to-human interaction, especially in intricate sectors like health and insurance.
“AI-powered self-service must complement, not replace, live support, ensuring customer access to human help for complex needs. We want to give customers information, but not be a gatekeeper to live support.” – Zendesk customer, HR software industry
These customers have evolved their help centers with Zendesk to get the right message to the right audience at the right time. By understanding the role AI plays in augmenting self-service for customers and agents, CX leaders strategize better, improve experiences, and optimize resources.
For more Zendesk POV on AI, visit our Newsroom.