Singapore – Zendesk, a customer experience tech firm, has recently unveiled a series of solutions that include AI-powered agents for omnichannel support, enhanced agent copilot, and agent builder.
According to the firm, these new capabilities aim to help companies in providing services that are easy to use, scale, and drive meaningful business results. This initiative further involves the introduction of its latest fully featured voice solution that enables agents to offer faster, personalised, and more human conversations, and the ability to solve more complex cases.
Other enhancements to Zendesk voice also encompass upgrades to call monitoring, advanced routing, enhanced AI support and queue management, enabling human agents to skip repetitive tasks and focus on resolving escalated issues for customers.
Speaking about the initiative, Tom Eggemeier, CEO at Zendesk, commented, “AI is now bridging the gap between high quality service, at a lower cost, while delivering much more personalised experiences. 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.”
Maureen Chong, regional vice president for Asia at Zendesk, further shared, “Consumers in Asia Pacific are warming up to AI, to the point where most are open to interacting with either AI or a human agent,, as long as they receive quick assistance. For businesses to meet growing consumer expectations and truly unlock the potential of AI, it must be seamlessly integrated across all the channels their customers are on.”
“We’re confident that our latest AI innovations–trained on the world’s largest CX-specific database–will deliver measurable value and significant efficiency gains that deliver competitive differentiation, to ultimately drive long term business success,” explained Chong.
With AI agents available on all digital channels, including voice, the company also ensures that the autonomous bots can function independently or assist human agents in resolving customer issues.
In addition, Zendesk has also rolled out an AI agent builder that makes it easy for businesses to set up AI agents and manage them, and add controls.
Through these new innovations, Zendesk is designed for AI agents to allow companies to tap into the full benefits of AI by offering instant, accurate responses with generative replies and address more sophisticated issues with customisable conversation flows, now extended to email.
The firm is further targeting to automate up to 50% of voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support across channels.
When it comes to creating and controlling AI agents through the AI agent builder, Zendesk also confirmed that it requires zero training and offers full customisation including adjusting the brand’s tone while reducing the time to build, deploy, and maintain.
Additionally, the recently enhanced agent copilot can now anticipate customer needs, offer proactive recommendations, and take actions autonomously with the now widely available “auto assist” mode.
Its functions further encompass following 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.
Through the latest enhancements, the voice agent copilot now delivers real-time call insights, including customer sentiment and intent, while swiftly retrieving answers from the knowledge base. This approach allows companies to provide quicker, personalised service to customers dealing with complex, high-priority issues that need human intervention.
Interestingly, Zendesk is introducing more AI-powered insights to 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.
Steve Franklin, head of global operations at Siemens Financial Services, remarked,“With Zendesk, we’ve seen a major increase in agent productivity, with nearly double productivity gains in key markets like France while achieving increased customer satisfaction.”
“As AI agents handle basic requests and populate tickets with data, our human agents are freed up to focus on value-added customer interactions. This is all critical to providing a holistic and streamlined customer journey, powered by AI,” he said.
