Zendesk has announced customer experience (CX) generative AI advancements that allow companies to realise immediate business value through improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs and increased customer loyalty.
As part of the Zendesk AI solution, companies can deploy generative AI-powered bots that quickly and seamlessly supply answers to customers. Additionally, agents, admins and managers now have more AI tools to customise and enhance their CX solutions.
As part of the next wave of Zendesk AI innovation, agents now have the option to receive AI-generated conversation summaries and transcripts that capture customer sentiment, which increases productivity and reduces costs.
Available now, businesses now have access to advanced safeguards and controls to manage customer data and ensure that generative AI is safely and securely deployed.
“Constant AI innovation is the new reality for CX leaders. While this promising technology unlocks incredible opportunities, it also adds pressure to deploy rapidly evolving capabilities in a timely manner and deliver meaningful business value,” says Tom Eggemeier, CEO of Zendesk.
“Zendesk is the best partner for businesses during this transformative time. We bring a powerful combination of deep CX and AI experience to provide capabilities that allow CX teams to be more efficient and empathetic. This improves customer and employee satisfaction and delivers cost efficiencies and revenue growth.”
According to the 2023 Zendesk CX Trends Report, nearly 70% of consumers expect most companies will use generative AI to improve their experiences.
The new Zendesk generative AI capabilities enable bots to summarise critical information from multiple help centre articles for more natural customer conversations. With these Zendesk AI enhancements, agents can resolve requests faster and more consistently with contextually similar tickets. Additionally, admins can review AI-provided intent suggestions that address gaps in answers and adjust bot tone to be more casual or professional to stay consistent with brand persona.
“Our team is very focused on operational efficiency and with Zendesk AI, we implemented AI immediately – without any developer support – while maintaining high-quality, personalised service for our customer base of more than 1.2 million online shoppers,” says Aashley Malsbury, senior operations manager at Grove Collaborative.
“As we implement Zendesk AI across our CX portfolio, there is massive potential to eliminate manual work for agents, which allows them to focus on more important tasks that are key to maintaining our 95% CSAT score.”
As part of this release, Zendesk AI is expanding intent detection to additional industries and use cases, including Insurance, Travel/Tourism and more. Companies in these industries can now take common intents and edit them for their specific needs, such as detecting frequently asked questions by travellers and escalating to agents specially equipped to handle these issues.
Additionally, Zendesk announced AI for Voice, which further reduces manual work for agents working on the phone by summarising the conversation, providing a transcript and identifying customer sentiment. This saves time and allows agents to focus on customer resolutions.
As the demand for AI-driven and personalised experiences grows, companies find securing data across the customer journey increasingly important. As part of Zendesk's commitment to trust and security, the company provides auditability, encryption, and business resilience as well as a variety of certifications, including FedRAMP and ISO certifications, and compliance controls to meet HIPAA and GDPR requirements.
Zendesk has launched an advanced data privacy and protection package to build on these offerings. This provides companies with greater control and flexibility over customer data to safeguard their business with stronger and targeted encryption; elevate privacy by specifying what data is shown and kept; and strengthen security and visibility by logging who accessed and searched for data.
These capabilities will help businesses manage rapidly evolving data requirements accelerated by advances in AI. As the industry continues to grow, Zendesk is committed to guiding companies through changing regulations and ensuring control and flexibility over managing customer data.
“There is a lot of value and power that generative AI and LLMs promise for businesses. However, we must set an example on building CX responsibly and guide our customers to reduce risk,” says Cristina Fonseca, Head of AI, Zendesk.
“In line with our security principles and privacy framework, we have built in safeguards and control for companies to set limits for bots. For example, when sensitive information (such as medical history) comes up, an agent must be brought into the customer conversation.”