Zendesk introduced a series of innovations, including AI-powered agents for omnichannel support, enhanced agent copilot, and agent builder. Leading in AI-powered customer and employee experiences through its complete service solution, Zendesk’s new capabilities help companies deliver exceptional service in a way that is easy to use, scale, and drive meaningful business results.
The company also announced a new fully-featured voice solution that can enable agents to deliver faster, personalised, and more human conversations, as well as the ability to solve more complex cases. In addition to the new innovations announced, other enhancements to Zendesk voice include upgrades to call monitoring, advanced routing, enhanced AI support and queue management, allowing human agents to skip repetitive tasks and focus on helping customers with escalations.
“AI is now bridging the gap between high quality service, at a lower cost, while delivering much more personalised experiences,” said Tom Eggemeier, CEO, Zendesk, noting 73% of consumers believe AI improves the quality of customer service. “Our latest innovations, including voice AI, assist human agents in working efficiently alongside AI to deliver tailored, efficient service. This partnership leads to faster issue resolution, higher customer satisfaction and provides valuable business insights.”
According to Zendesk’s Future of AI-powered CX Report, a vast majority (89%) of CX leaders in India believe CX will undergo a period of unprecedented change over the next 3 years, with a similar proportion (83%) believing that all conversations will be AI-powered in the same timeframe. But there’s another challenge to contend with—consumer demand for phone support. As Indian consumers embrace a digital-first approach to CX, phone support remains one of the top three channels they prefer for more complex issues. At the same time, they also want the convenience of omnichannel support, with one-third going as far as saying the ease in getting help across channels determines their purchase decisions.
“Even as consumers in India lead the Asia Pacific region in their attitudes and expectations towards AI adoption, phone support still remains an important communication channel. They want businesses to offer them options in how they choose to engage—be it through email, chat, phone call, or self-service,” said Maureen Chong, Regional Vice President, Asia, Zendesk. “The challenge for brands today is finding ways to manage CX costs while delivering exceptional service in whatever channels customers are on. Zendesk’s latest AI solutions offer Indian businesses a seamless way to integrate AI across all channels, including voice, helping them manage the increasing complexity and volume of tickets while improving agent productivity and delivering on customer expectations.”
New voice innovation transforms the automated call experience
Leaders are facing a reality of rising ticket volumes and increasingly complex issues, prompting them to transform traditional call centres into a modern omnichannel experience complete with new productivity tools powered by AI.
Working together with the expanded AI agent and copilot capabilities, the enhanced voice solution allows companies to:
- Quickly and easily route, and resolve voice calls, plus report on voice metrics–such as call type, answer time, wait time, talk time, abandonment–now on phone alongside all other channels.
- Resolve customer calls with a new 24/7 AI agent for voice, powered by Poly.ai, that can autonomously resolve up to 50% of all calls.
- Provide more accurate resolutions, resolve calls faster and cut admin time with transcripts and summaries with enhanced Al-assisted support.
- Take action on churn risks and outliers with improved QA insights from evaluating 100% of human and AI agent conversations to pinpoint and fix gaps in customer experiences.
- Deliver faster, more personalised service to customers who call in with complex, high-value issues that require human assistance, with instant call insights and answers from the knowledge base.
Combined power of AI and human agents elevate CX – across all digital channels
As the industry shifts to completely automated interactions, new capabilities for Zendesk AI agents allow companies to tap into the full benefits of AI by:
- Delivering instant, accurate responses with generative replies and address more sophisticated issues with customisable conversation flows, now extending to email.
- Automating voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support across channels.
- Creating and controlling AI agents using a new AI agent builder, requiring zero training and offering full customisation–such as adjusting the brand’s tone–while reducing the time to build, deploy, and maintain.
Improved autonomy and proactivity for enhanced agent copilot
In more complex, high-value interactions between human agents and customers, agent copilot can now:
- Anticipate customer needs, offer proactive recommendations, and take actions autonomously with the now widely available “auto assist” mode.
- Follow specific processes on behalf of an agent and instantly sync changes to ensure agents are always following the latest procedures with the new copilot business procedures.
- Surface relevant issues and proactive insights–such as similar resolutions–directly within the new AI-powered workspace, ensuring all tools are easily discoverable and keeping workflows uninterrupted.
As part of the enhancements, agent copilot for voice* now provides instant call insights such as customer sentiment and intent, plus quickly surfaces answers from the knowledge base. This allows companies to deliver faster, personalised service to customers who call in with complex, high-value issues that require human assistance.
Supercharged insights provide valuable and actionable business intelligence for CX teams
Zendesk is introducing more AI-powered insights that analyse customer conversations across systems, extract valuable key insights, and enable real-time business intelligence. By surfacing strategic opportunities, leaders can apply these across teams and make changes needed to improve CX, which can in turn positively influence CSAT.
With improved AI-driven insights, companies can now:
- Quickly uncover why customers are reaching out with granular details through enhanced intents and entity detection, enabling faster and more personalised resolutions.
- Proactively design and refine workflows using out-of-the-box insights from the new intelligent triage dashboard, ensuring critical issues are efficiently routed and automated.
- Use Quality Assurance across every touchpoint, now including voice and AI agents to automatically analyse and optimise customer conversations and agent performance.
For more on the future of AI-powered CX, register for the digital broadcast of Zendesk AI Summit on Oct. 15-16 or visit the Zendesk Newsroom.