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