Zendesk’s Satisfaction Prediction Brings Machine Learning to the Customer Experience

March 15, 2016

RELATE LIVE CONFERENCE, SA0 PAULO, BRAZIL – March 15, 2016 – Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced Satisfaction Prediction–the first machine learning and predictive analytics feature for customer satisfaction–is available to Zendesk customers on the Enterprise plan. Satisfaction Prediction leverages machine learning to predict how likely a ticket is to receive a good or bad rating, helping organizations take action to ensure positive outcomes. Since launching in beta five months ago, Satisfaction Prediction has analyzed over 2 million customer interactions and has been successfully deployed by businesses globally including Pinterest, Digitec, and Easy Taxi.

“We’ve been using Satisfaction Prediction to detect conversations with customers that are most at risk of a poor customer experience,” said Maggie Armato, Reactive Support Lead at Pinterest. “Previously, we had a manual process where a dedicated team member would look through our tickets and proactively flag experiences identified as potentially negative. Now, we use the prediction score to accurately and automatically identify these types of tickets so our agents can focus on higher value areas.”

“Customer relationships have become increasingly complicated with the rise of communications across mobile, social, and everywhere in between,” said Adrian McDermott, SVP Product Development at Zendesk. “We designed Satisfaction Prediction to help businesses navigate these complex relationships by bringing data into the equation. By having an early warning system that identifies high-risk interactions, companies can course-correct negative experiences before they ever even happen.”

Satisfaction Prediction uses machine learning to read and transform hundreds of signals including text description, number of replies and total wait time into a unique model that dynamically calculates how likely a customer is to provide a positive satisfaction rating. This rating allows agents to prioritize workflows, drive business rules, or trigger downstream integrations based on data-driven analysis.

New features released for Satisfaction Prediction include:

• Beautifully simple dashboard analytics: provides a snapshot into the health of ticket queues, changes over time, and insights into how key metrics like number of replies and reassignment volumes influence the prediction score.

• Real-time feedback: intelligent prediction models learn and improve over time with a new mechanism which learns from the feedback of customers who rate their experience and the input of agents working with the customer.

 
“The volume of customer data is increasing rapidly with the use of digital channels. As a result, the demand for real-time solutions to facilitate faster decision-making at critical points in the customer journey is increasing,” said Aphrodite Brinsmead, Principal Analyst at Ovum Research. “With Satisfaction Prediction, Zendesk customers do not need to employ a data scientist or worry about gathering relevant data; the feature simply predicts and identifies more sensitive queries, prevents customers from churning, and improves satisfaction rates” (Ovum, “Predicting customer satisfaction helps prioritize interactions and prevent churn, February 2016).

Pricing and Availability

Satisfaction Prediction is now generally available for Enterprise plan customers who receive a minimum of 500 satisfaction ratings per month. For more information on the feature, visit: https://www.zendesk.com/analytics/satisfaction-prediction/.

A new Ovum report about Zendesk’s Satisfaction Prediction, “Predicting customer satisfaction helps prioritize interactions and prevent churn,” is available for complimentary download for a limited time at: http://zdsk.co/ovum-csat

About Zendesk

Zendesk provides a customer service platform designed to bring organizations and their customers closer together. With more than 69,000 paid customer accounts, Zendesk’s products are used by organizations in 150 countries and territories to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.