Zendesk is spreading the magic dust of AI throughout the customer experience and service journey, as well as providing a new 24/7 AI agent to handle phone calls.
Zendesk, the customer service and experience platform, announced initiatives that will infuse AI capabilities including agents and copilots across its platform, as well as a new voice agent able to converse with customers.
The announcements came at the Zendesk AI Summit in New York City today.
Combining AI and human agents. Zendesk will make AI agents available across all digital channels. The agents will be able to work autonomously or in partnership with human agents to resolve customer issues. The hope is that assigning basic interactions to AI agents will give human agents more time to focus on more complex or valuable engagement.
Zendesk will also offer an AI agent builder allowing clients to set up and customize AI agents including adjusting their responses to reflect brand voice.
Enhanced agent copilot. Zendesk also announced enhancements to its agent copilot that has been available in an early access program since April. The agent copilot is best understood as an AI-powered assistant to human agents. New capabilities include:
- Offering proactive recommendations by anticipating customer needs.
- Taking actions autonomously in “auto assist” mode.
- Surfacing proactive insights such as similar resolutions directly within the workspace.
Also, agent copilot for voice will be able to surface insights such as customer sentiment and intent during calls as well as pulling relevant information from the knowledge base.
AI voice for the entire call journey. Zendesk also unveiled an AI-powered voice solution to deliver unified CX and support throughout the entire call journey. This is aimed at delivering personalized and “more human” voice conversations. Customers will be able to speak naturally with a 24/7 AI-powered agent, making AI assistance available in what remains one of the most popular channels for customer engagement: the phone.
The agent will be able to:
- Route and resolve customer calls while recording metrics such as call type, answer time, wait time, talk time and abandonment.
- Autonomously resolve around 50% of calls.
Human agents can focus on dealing with escalated issues.
Why we care. Good to see the human still in there because this ambitious set of announcements is going to need to balance two aspects of customer experience. First, the desire of customers to have issues resolved quickly and efficiently without “we are experiencing an unusually high number of calls and an agent will be with you shortly…” Second, where an issue can’t be easily resolved, the need to speak to an actual human being.
The latter experience can’t yet be replaced but Zendesk is set on making the former experience routine.
The post Zendesk saturates CX with AI and voice appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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