Highlights:

  • Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist represent the next stage in Zendesk’s mission to make Customer Experience AI accessible to businesses of all sizes.
  • According to a Zendesk study, 80% of inquiries may be reduced to 20 concerns. This information is tremendously useful to streamline and enhance CX operations.

Zendesk, a San Francisco-based firm, announced the launch of new Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, that enable organizations to automatically prioritize customer support queries and access critical data at scale. By democratizing access to these solutions, businesses may realize benefits within minutes by understanding intent and sentiment using account-specific, data-driven models tailored to particular use cases and facilitating speedier resolutions.

While industry analysts predict that AI will soon impact most customer service interactions, research by Zendesk shows that less than a third of companies are using AI to help their service teams become more efficient. This is partly because even though AI technology has advanced quickly over the past five years, software companies have not passed improvements to customers and are still marketing expensive AI solutions that are incredibly time-consuming.

Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist represent the next stage in Zendesk’s mission to make Customer Experience (CX) AI accessible to businesses of all sizes. The feature uses proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and applies a vertical lens. This generates models that are customizable for each business and are capable of understanding the intent, language, and mood of every client interaction.

This innovative approach of applying machine learning produces more tailored and well-informed interactions to serve customers. For example, specific inquiries, such as “I’m having problems with payment,” can be automatically routed to an agent equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution. On the other hand, inquiries containing language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic manner indicate highly negative sentiments and are prioritized.

The new capabilities perform the following:

  • Route and prioritize revenue drivers instantly, thus ensuring agents are working on business-critical requests.
  • Analyze the distribution of requests so firms can better plan operations, cooperate across departments, and find data-supported improvement opportunities for more effective CX operations.
  • Guide agents automatically on how to effectively address a client issue in real time, analyze the context, offer solutions, and enhance coaching and training with relevant information.
  • Continuously enhance precision when the AI solutions get feedback on predictions and recommendations.
  • Automatically identify sensitive information to fulfill compliance and security requirements, or extract personal data such as names, addresses, phone numbers, usernames, and financial information for use in processes.

All these features are offered out-of-the-box, included with The Zendesk Suite Enterprise Edition, without needing months of training or expensive development assistance.

Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, said, “With this technology, we’re delivering AI tools that can be set up in under a minute to streamline business operations without needing dedicated developers or an expensive implementation. Our approach is designed to take the burden off customer experience teams through pre-trained machine learning tools that do more, faster, and with less guesswork. These models come ready to use instantly, continue learning over time and become customized to each company’s operations by continuously incorporating feedback.”

According to a Zendesk study, 80% of inquiries may be reduced to 20 concerns. This information is tremendously useful to streamline and enhance CX operations.

Shelly Kramer, the founding partner of Futurum research, said, “I’m a big fan of anything that makes customer experiences better, and the ability to triage requests is a foundational element, not only for CX efficiency but also for customer satisfaction. Zendesk’s AI tools nail it when it comes to quickly and easily determining customers’ intent and sentiment, allowing for quick routing to the right agent and speedy identification of areas where processes can be improved. This ensures the speedy (sometimes instantaneous) resolution of customer issues, helps the customer service team remain agile (especially during busy times like the holiday season), and delivers bottom-line business benefits in terms of hours/costs saved. There’s nothing not to like about this new functionality.”

Cristina Fonseca, vice president of product, Zendesk, said, “Instead of putting bots that aren’t fully trained in front of customers, causing frustration and many times lost business, Zendesk’s fundamentally different approach takes the burden and complexity off of customers, allowing companies to build powerful applications on top of a strong foundation.”