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

October 9, 2024

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK – October 9, 2024 – Today, Zendesk introduced a series of innovations, including AI-powered agents for omnichannel support, enhanced agent copilot, powerful voice, and agent builder. Leading in AI-powered customer and employee experiences through its complete service solution, Zendesk’s new capabilities help companies deliver exceptional service in a way that is easy to use, scale, and drive meaningful 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 making AI agents ​​available on all channels, including voice, ensuring that these autonomous bots can work independently or alongside human agents in resolving customer issues. Additionally, the company today introduced a new AI agent builder that makes it easy for businesses to set up AI agents and add controls.

As the industry shifts to completely automated interactions, these new capabilities for Zendesk AI agents allow companies to tap into the full benefits of AI by:

• Delivering instant, accurate responses with generative replies and address more sophisticated issues with customizable conversation flows, now extended to email.
• Automating up to 50% of voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support across channels.
• 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 enhancing agent copilot with powerful capabilities that are available for all companies to deliver consistent, high-quality service. In more complex, high-value interactions between human agents and customers, agent copilot can now:

• 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 the new copilot business 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.

As part of the enhancements, agent copilot for voice* now provides instant call insights such as customer sentiment and intent, plus quickly surfaces answers from the knowledge base. This allows companies to deliver faster, personalized service to customers who call in with complex, high-value issues that require human assistance.

Supercharged insights provide valuable and actionable business intelligence for CX teams
Zendesk is introducing more AI-powered insights to analyze customer conversations across systems, extract valuable key insights, and enable real-time business intelligence. By surfacing strategic opportunities, leaders can apply these across teams and make changes needed to improve CX, which can in turn positively influence CSAT.

With improved 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.

“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.”

For more on the future of AI-powered CX, register for the digital broadcast of Zendesk AI Summit on Oct. 15-16 or visit the Zendesk Newsroom.

*Agent copilot for voice will be available in H1 2025, more information coming soon.