Shaping the future of intelligent CX with Zendesk AI

The world is changing and customer experience is shifting alongside. Advances in technology, combined with new and ongoing business challenges, put us all under pressure to continue to evolve, improve and do more for our customers.

Many businesses have managed through supply chain disruptions, rising costs and the ongoing shift into the digital landscape – all while under a cloud layer of ongoing economic uncertainty. Companies are faced with tightening margins and cutting costs. Meanwhile, consumer expectations continue to rise.

We are challenged to do more with less, but change can also represent opportunity – and it’s possible now to increase efficiency by leveraging new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI. Today at our flagship global conference, Zendesk Relate, we unveiled the future of intelligent CX, which will transform the customer experience by delivering personalised, empathetic and effortless experiences that are a perfect blend of IQ and EQ. Businesses will anticipate and efficiently respond to customer needs to build strong relationships and drive profitable growth.

We can achieve this vision by combining AI with rich and dynamic conversational experiences and customer data to provide more personalisation – all while respecting the customer’s desire to manage privacy on their own terms.

Zendesk AI, purpose-built for CX

Today we announced Zendesk AI as our intelligence layer and a new offering that combines years’ worth of Zendesk data and insights with new AI technologies to instantly improve your service experience, save time and better understand your customers. In our opening keynote speech, Cristina Fonseca, Head of AI, shared our unique approach and some powerful examples that illustrate exactly how this new technology creates even greater efficiency and empathy for your customers.

Moreover, this technology is available today. Zendesk AI is pre-trained and leverages the billions of service interactions we have available to us. We’ve removed the need for companies to hire large teams of developers to implement and train your AI. Instead, it works right out of the box and is fast to deploy, easy to use and can immediately add value, all while continuing to learn from your datasets and every customer interaction. This makes personalised, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences accessible for all companies in a way they’ve never been available before.

New capabilities announced today include:

• Intelligent triage: Uses intent detection, language detection and sentiment analysis to automatically classify incoming customer issues and create powerful intelligent workflows and reporting, leveraging these insights.
• Advanced bots: Enhanced, pre-trained bots for messaging and email automatically solve issues and leverage the most extensive database of customer intents for more personalised, industry-specific and accurate responses.
• Macro suggestions for admins: AI automatically scans agent comments, tickets and common responses and then suggests new macros, identifies gaps, adjusts existing macros and streamlines the approval process, reducing the time spent creating macros and analysing usage.

You’ll see this intelligence infused throughout the entire customer journey and into the agent and admin experience. Now, incoming messages and emails can be automatically analysed by our proprietary and large language models (LLMs) to understand customer intent with customer sentiment – across 19 languages – to help resolve issues in real time. And by eliminating the work of manual triage, team capacity increases dramatically – especially during periods of peak volume – all while reducing operating expenses.

Enhancing the agent experience with OpenAI

We also recently announced a partnership with OpenAI, which enables features that leverage the power of generative AI, so that you can provide intelligent operations at scale. This includes ticket summarisation, easy response rephrasing and tone shift to help agents craft clear and thoughtful responses to customers, faster.

New features that bring generative AI into our Agent Workspace include:

• Summarise, which generates a quick summary after reading customer messages, agent replies and internal notes, all without leaving the ticket. This can be especially helpful when a ticket is escalated or transferred and an agent needs to quickly get up to speed.
• Expand, a time-saver that allows an agent to type a reply in just a few words and then select to enable a more complete AI-generated and polished customer-ready response to review and send.
• Tone Shift, a new tool that enables agents to highlight a message and instantly adjust the wording so that it sounds warmer and more friendly – or more formal and official, as the case may be – depending on the context of the conversation.

These features are available today in early access and require our new Advanced AI Add-On.

Embedded security within our platform

We can’t talk about data without addressing privacy and security. We continue to enhance and evolve our security alongside changes in regulatory and industry frameworks, including GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP and more.

Today we announced Advanced Data Protection for Enterprise and Enterprise Plus customers, available later this year. It is designed to help companies with more advanced security needs to adapt to compliance regulations. We’re committed to building responsible AI and trust and security is imperative to this.

Today we announced AI Trust and Privacy Standards that will:

• Provide choice: An easy opt-out if you don’t want your data used for our shared model features.
• Provide transparency: Our use of external LLMs won’t be turned on for you unless you choose to opt in, and we’ll educate you about how we’ve evaluated and selected our external partners.
• Use AI to enhance protection: A robust roadmap of features that use AI to help in the detection and removal of personal data and the automatic redaction of other sensitive data, to reduce your risks.

We’re dedicated to wrapping privacy, security and governance around all of our products and to ensuring compliance with globally recognised standards and frameworks.

Conversational Commerce delivers seamless and more personalised experiences

In our 2023 CX Trends Report, 70% of customers expect conversational experiences when interacting with brands and 70% of customers purchase more from companies that offer seamless, conversational experiences.

We continue to see this emphasis on the importance of personalised and convenient interactions via messaging, especially when it comes to consumer retail interactions.

Thus, through closer partnerships with Meta’s WhatsApp and Shopify, Conversational Commerce, a new solution by Zendesk’s innovation group called Zendesk Labs, is designed to better connect brands with shoppers throughout their digital journey. You can provide direct support, marketing and sales all from within a single conversation. This new offering enables companies to provide:

• Service personalisation: Agents can action abandoned carts, support active carts, inform customers on nearby stock to complete purchases and share feature promotions in the moment to create stellar personalised experiences.
• Sales acceleration: Agents can identify new revenue opportunities by understanding any shopper’s complete purchase history, merchandise preferences and browsing journey to drive new options through rich product recommendations for cross-sell and upsell, increasing overall order value.
• Unified data at scale: Businesses can use AI to automate conversions and recommendations supported by over 1,400 prebuilt apps and integrations that can unify SKU, inventory and location data for seamless product tracking, or connect disparate systems for a 360° view of the customer.

As part of this solution, our Zendesk Labs team of experts will also help design and workshop the best Conversational Commerce solution from the ground up for interested customers.

Get started today

This is just the beginning of many exciting innovations to come and these features will soon become part of your everyday experience with Zendesk. We’re excited to embark on this journey of intelligent CX together.