Zendesk saturates CX with AI and voice

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. “The fixation on AI for its own sake is fading,” said Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier, emphasizing that business leaders were now looking at business-specific outcomes. In the service setting, that means aiming for an ambitious 90% plus of automated resolutions.

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.

“An AI agent standing next to us, smarter and better organized than us — that’s the future of work,” said Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott to the AI Summit audience.

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. Zendesk SVP, product and solutions marketing, Lisa Kant emphasized the B2C market: “B2C is ripe for automation,” she said, “because customer queries can be so repetitive.”

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.

“In the future,” said Davenport, “80% of the conversations you have with customers will be fully automated.” He predicted that AI automation would have an impact across not only service but also sales and “even marketing.”

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.

Do customers like what’s happening? Seventy-three percent of consumers now have a positive attitude to AI-powered service. Eggemeier admitted that this represents “a massive shift in the past year.”

Dig deeper: How to use micro-moments to capture customer intent in real-time