Zendesk was founded on the belief that CX could be better, bringing a beautifully simple, easy-to-use solution to the legacy world of expensive call centre technology. Nearly two decades later, we’re here to disrupt the industry once again – this time with AI.
In a few short years, 100% of service interactions will involve AI. With the right AI in place, those interactions will actually result in higher-quality service for everyone involved – not just your customers, but also your agents, your admins, your managers and even your C-suite. Zendesk AI is the world’s most complete service solution for the AI era, and it’s the only AI solution purpose-built for human connection.
Today, we’re announcing a new wave of innovations that will change the way your service operations are run and help transform the way you lead your company. Our new Agent copilot and AI agents will uplevel and scale your team, helping you deliver world-class service through every interaction. We’re also introducing Zendesk Workforce Engagement (WEM), with workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA) capabilities that allow you to measure the success of every interaction across all your channels. Zendesk WFM and QA provide real-time insights that help you optimise operations on the fly and get in front of complex planning issues. With deeper insights about customers, products and business processes, Zendesk AI can drive business outcomes you never thought possible.
Unlocking workforce talent and capacity
Zendesk Agent copilot is the first proactive, AI-powered assistant purpose-built for customer service. When copilot joins your team, all your human agents become high performers who know exactly what to say and do at every step of every interaction, thanks to copilot’s proactive guidance. Other copilot options require agents to hunt for information – so the burden is on agents to ask questions. Zendesk’s copilot is different, with the ability to anticipate next steps, make proactive suggestions and even take action on behalf of agents. There’s no training or ramp-up time for your human agents to get started; copilot is built seamlessly into every workflow in a way that boosts productivity from day one. Zendesk Agent copilot is available in early access now.
But it’s time to move beyond thinking human agents are the only option for delighting customers and handling complex issues. Introducing Zendesk AI agents – the most autonomous and agile bots in the industry. AI agents are trained on the highest quality CX data set and backed by data from more than 18 billion CX-specific interactions, so they have the intelligence to navigate the unpredictable twists and turns of real-life conversations and resolve even the most complex interactions with accuracy, speed and grace. Zendesk AI agents are designed for autonomous resolution, with some customers already automating up to 80% of their interactions, and they’re now available to every Zendesk customer. To get started, simply enable your AI agent to access your Zendesk knowledge base. It’s that easy. No training required.
Increasing scale and quality
Scheduling has always been a Goldilocks problem: too many human agents, and you’ve got high labour costs; too few, and you have angry customers. With the new Zendesk workforce management (WFM), you can predict exactly how many human agents you need and automatically schedule – and reschedule – in real time based on shifts in volume or channel. WFM leverages AI to evaluate your historical ticket volume, faster and more accurately than any human can. You can see how much of that volume was from a specific channel, support tier, agent type or any other category you use. With all this insight, Zendesk AI predicts required staffing and automatically builds a schedule for your agents.
AI is great for scale, but quality is an equally important aspect. Today, most companies can only evaluate 1 to 2% of their tickets, which introduces a lot of risk. With Zendesk QA, now you can evaluate every interaction regardless of agent type, across all your channels. This now includes voice. Our new Voice QA puts the power of Zendesk AI to work to evaluate call transcripts, score calls and identify outliers for manual review, just like it does for other channels. You can see alerts about dead air, or where agents forgot to disclose that the call would be recorded. Voice QA is available today to our customers using Zendesk Talk, Amazon Connect and Aircall, with more partners coming later this year.
As you lean into the massive opportunity our AI agents deliver, it’s imperative to understand how they’re performing with each customer interaction. With the introduction of Zendesk QA for AI Agents, we’re extending the QA capabilities used to evaluate human conversations to 100% of your AI interactions. So, you can be confident your AI agents are delivering on their commitment to accuracy, speed and the highest quality. It’ll tag churn risks and negative sentiment in AI conversations to help you determine when you need to update source content, refine automated workflows or follow up with customers. Now you have a complete picture of how all your agents are performing and the actionable insights needed to optimise them for results.
All this is now available with our new Zendesk Workforce Engagement (WEM) solution.
Built-in trust
All great relationships start with trust. Zendesk AI is built on a foundation of responsible AI principles. We give you complete control over your AI deployments, with rigorous safeguards to support compliance with security and privacy regulations. Zendesk comes with powerful security and privacy controls built-in at every level of our platform, so you can have confidence that your business will be protected and stay ahead of the changing data privacy and security landscape. If your organisation has more stringent data and compliance needs, Zendesk Advanced Data Privacy and Protection gives you our most sophisticated set of capabilities, including enhanced privacy controls, advanced encryption and data retention policies, and access logging.
Get started today
Some AI products are going to promise you the world – only for you to find out that it’s nothing more than a box of parts and a long road to implementation. Zendesk AI is ready to go on day one. There’s no lengthy setup process or months-long training required. We seamlessly embed the most innovative AI technology across our complete CX solution, and let you choose how you want to apply it across your organisation. In short, our approach to building and delivering AI reflects our belief that every service interaction should be as exceptional as the human on the other end.
For more from Zendesk Relate, watch on-demand recordings of the keynote and select sessions. And visit our Zendesk AI page for a deeper dive into our vision for AI-powered service.