Zendesk is expanding its AI agents to more digital channels where users submit support tickets. Previously limited to social media, these bots now also handle email and voice interactions. In addition, the customer experience company is announcing its Agent copilot is now generally available. These updates, revealed at the company’s AI Summit, build on the AI-powered solution launched in April, designed to help businesses handle both the volume and quality of customer interactions.
“What we are here for is to make it easy for any company in the world to deliver a great best-in-class customer service experience,” Jon Aniano, Zendesk’s senior vice president of product, tells me. With AI agents, he says, “we are making them more powerful and more ubiquitous.”
Disclosure: I attended Zendesk's AI Summit as a guest of the company with my flights and hotel covered. Zendesk did not dictate the contents of this post. These are my words.Omnichannel Customer Service AI Agents
“Over the last 18 months, with generative AI in everyone’s tool belt, what a best-in-class customer service experience is has changed,” Aniano says. “The most exciting thing happening in the best customer service operations right now is great automation powered by AI agents. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, 100 percent of all customer service interactions will touch an AI-powered system, and 80 percent of the customer service interactions worldwide will be automated without using a human in the loop.”
When it launched six months ago, Zendesk’s AI agents were designed to autonomously interact with customers, understand their needs and deliver the necessary resolution. At the time, chief executive Tom Eggemeier claimed these “sophisticated” AI-powered bots could be integrated with any knowledge base and customized to respond to the “most intricate use cases.” These agents are powered by an AI created by a mashup of OpenAI and third-party models complete with grounding and control mechanisms.
Like most tech companies deploying AI, Zendesk claims its bots and copilot will free human agents from mundane tasks and allow them to dedicate more resources to creative endeavors. The company believes that with more automation, there will be a greater volume of customer interactions.
“With every change in the way humans communicate, there is a subsequent change in customer service. When we went from phones to the web, there was a change in customer service tools and technologies. When we went from the web to email, from email to social, social to mobile, and now with AI, what happens is that human behavior changes, and therefore, customer service teams have to catch up,” Aniano declares. “But what happens every single time is volumes go up. When it became easier…more frictionless to interact….the volumes went up. And with AI, I think we’ll see the volumes go up.”
“While AI is going to help us automate, guess what? We might see a 3x, 4x, or 5x increase in the total volume of interactions. And the nature of the work is going to change. Those agents in the market will have different types of issues they’re dealing with. They may have more of an oversight role. They may have more of an approval role. They may have more quality of life in their day-to-day experience working with agent tools. But, I think the volume of customer service will continue to increase as it becomes easier to interact with companies.”
AI Agents Answering Emails: The Big Unlock
Today, Zendesk is making its AI agents “much easier to get started” and with “zero training.” You describe the problems in your customer service world, and Zendesk’s agents will start automating solutions. Agents can be developed to support any use case. Much of what these bots can do is possible through the company’s March 2024 acquisition of the German customer automation startup Ultimate.
And they’re being extended beyond core messaging—in April, Zendesk agents were limited to the web, messaging apps and social channels. Now, they can service email and voice. “A majority of customer service is still done over email, and…we’re making AI agents work over the email channel as well as they did over messaging,” Aniano remarks.
Getting AI agents to handle customer issues by email appears straightforward. With little to no coding knowledge required, they can be programmed to analyze and generate a set of automated replies to an email channel based on the knowledge Zendesk’s AI already possesses within the system.
“For AI agents, it’s really a no-code required, no real AI knowledge required to set up a generative AI-powered bot,” Aniano shares.
Reinventing the IVR
Zendesk’s voice offering is also getting an AI infusion. The company is partnering with startup PolyAI to automate “up to 50 percent” of voice interactions. “Part of the amazing luxury we have at Zendesk is we get to solve very specific problems. We get to solve problems for customer service teams and employee service teams. And whenever we’re building new technology or choosing partners, we let those customers lead us,” Aniano explains.
“And so, for our customers that were forward-thinking, that were voice-heavy, that want to drive their automation rate up, they came to us with a bunch of different solutions—some homegrown, some legacy—but we were really impressed with the team at PolyAI and what they’ve built on a modern infrastructure with a modern setup, the same value proposition that Zendesk brings to customers,” he goes on to say.
When enabled, Zendesk’s AI agent will autonomously manage voice calls, allowing customers to describe their issues naturally.
“The thing about voice is that as a customer service channel, customers both love and hate it,” Aniano declares. “The reason they love it is because, if they do get connected with a human, they can have one-on-one conversations. They can have vocal cues, human emotion, and empathy all involved in that interaction. They feel like they’re getting served in a more direct, one-to-one way, and they’re served on their terms. So, voice is a critical channel. Customers absolutely love it, and it’s not going away, but there are things they hate about it.”
He points out that the addition of voice to Zendesk AI is “taking all of the bad stuff out of the voice channel” and will “accelerate all of the good stuff.” It’s redefining what an interactive voice response (IVR) system does when you dial that customer support number. It almost feels like Zendesk is trying to infuse some humanity back into the process.
However, the company recognizes the difficulties in generating natural language speech via AI in voice. Nevertheless, it is confident that the technology has improved to a point where at least AI agents can fulfill a promise made decades ago to “take all the bad parts away from a voice interaction.”
Build Your Own Zendesk AI agent
Zendesk is also introducing an AI agent builder, enabling anyone to launch an automated bot quickly and easily. The company “has always and will always be the [one] you come to if you want to get up and running quickly without spending massive amounts of money on…consulting or…development resources, just to get a standard customer service experience up and running,” Aniano states.
He explains that getting started is simple: Once the AI agent is enabled, admins use the company’s existing knowledge base and past customer service tickets in Zendesk to answer questions based on imported content and previous customer interactions. They can also unlock hybrid workflows that integrate with third-party systems, have a more flow-driven design and greater controls, and allow management of what’s automated or not, and stipulate when an issue is handed off to a human.
“Big update to AI agents,” Aniano summarizes. “Just more capability, ubiquity, power, [and] more channels.”
Agent Copilot For All
Another AI tool launched in April was Zendesk’s Agent copilot, an intelligent guide trained on past customer service experiences to improve workflows, address customer needs and suggest ways to resolve future interactions. It studies tickets human agents are working on and proactively recommends answers.
Here’s how Eggemeier described the experience to me:
“If you are interacting with the human agent through a chat, messaging, email, web form or any digital medium, our AI copilot actually suggests an answer for the agent before the agent types anything in.”
Think of Agent copilots as being more sophisticated than AI agents.
Access to Agent copilot was limited to select customers until now. Zendesk says more than 100 companies have run a pilot since Agent copilot debuted.
Along with expanding availability, Zendesk is enhancing its functionality. Like the AI agents, Agent copilot now supports email and voice channels. However, voice support is currently limited to early-access users, with general availability expected in the first half of 2025. This restricted access could be because the company wants to evaluate whether this more intelligent AI is ready to tackle voice interactions in prime time.
Agent copilot for voice offers real-time call insights, such as customer sentiment and intent, and surfaces answers from the library of knowledge Zendesk customers input into their instance.
In addition, Agent Copilot is getting new business procedures that enable it to follow specific processes on behalf of a human agent and syncing those changes in real-time to ensure the latest guidelines are followed. “You provide your procedures the same way that you would train an agent with a customer service procedure—’Here’s what to do in this type of issue’— a natural language one document—you plop that into Zendesk—and now, the AI, the copilot, will follow that procedure along with your agent and make recommendations on what the next step is to take,” Aniano remarks.
Zendesk has also introduced a new AI-powered workspace that displays relevant issues and proactive insights.
Can Zendesk Prove the Power of Its AI?
Zendesk’s AI is part of an increasingly crowded marketplace vying for companies’ attention. However, business leaders are concerned that the value remains missing amid all the hype around AI. Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff brought up this sentiment last month, taking a shot against Microsoft’s Copilot. Aniano took a different approach, calling out those who offer generic AI versus AI solving specific problems, like Zendesk.
“I do think that, with Salesforce, they also have a very broad brush of AI agents for everything now—for sales and marketing, and this and that, and internal use cases. And…that’s great, but at Zendesk, we focus specifically on customer service outcomes, and so everything we develop, and the way that you deploy AI agents is specifically set up for customer service use cases.
He also emphasized Zendesk’s outcome-based pricing as a better model than the company’s competitors. Under this price structure launched in August, customers will pay “for the actual thing they’re trying to do, which is resolve customer service issues.” Aniano describes other vendors in this space as “way behind,” saying an interaction-based pricing model is the wrong way of thinking. “The interaction isn’t the unit of value. The conversation isn’t the unit of value. It’s actually the outcome, the resolution, of a customer service issue without the use of a human. I’m really excited that we’re first to market there.”
Aniano doesn’t believe the vendors should try to build software that solves every use case: “Customers are not necessarily seeing the value, and they’re not getting that experience Zendesk promises, which is we’ll get you up and running with this new technology easily.” He asserts his company’s approach actually “solves our customer-specific problems.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.