Zendesk Unfurls New CX Capabilities powered by Generative Artificial Intelligence

Customer experience (CX) leaders are quickly realizing the infinite possibilities of using Generative Artificial Intelligence or GAI in the evolving technology landscape. The recent advancements in the GAI landscape have shown immense promise in improving customer satisfaction with superior AI-powered communications and omnichannel service delivery. Leading brands are already familiar with the GAI capabilities and preparing in advance for the New Year 2024, hoping they are the first to supply their customers with world-class CX offerings. Zendesk, a leader in the CX technology software industry, has unfurled new GAI capabilities to integrate its AI solution with its entire product suite. The updates involve better data security and privacy to boost CX software adoption across high-growth industries.

Let’s look at Zendesk’s generative AI capabilities with the new features.

Faster Bot Deployment with Zendesk AI and Automation

Bot deployment is a key to customer service management in 2023. According to Gartner, nearly one-fourth of organizations would use chatbots as their primary channel for customer service. ChatGPT and Bard-like natural language programming-based tools would drive innovations in the customer service industry. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational AI would automate and streamline bulk of digital conversations across the web, social, mobile, email, and messengers.

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The new Zendesk generative AI capabilities will empower the support, sales, and marketing teams with a good return on investments in voice and chatbot deployments.
For most organizations, the deployment of bots is a complex IT challenge. While chatbots can s********* 50% of overall customer support costs, a misconfigured bot deployment can be costly and a time-killer. That’s where Zendesk’s new Generative AI comes to the rescue. Contact centers can quickly deploy AI-powered bots that understand the granular-level requirements of every department, assisting agents with NLP-powered self-service automation and instant recommendations in real time.

The speed and ease of AI bots in customer service operations seamlessly supply answers to complex customer queries. This results in shorter call durations and increased customer loyalty. Overall, Zendesk AI runs on NLP algorithms (trained using billions of customer service interactions with Zendesk agents). It creates multiple options for agents to understand customer sentiments and enhance their CX goals with automation.

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At the time of this announcement, Tom Eggemeier, CEO of Zendesk, said, “Constant AI innovation is the new reality for CX leaders. While this promising technology unlocks incredible opportunities, it also adds pressure to deploy rapidly evolving capabilities in a timely manner and deliver meaningful business value. Zendesk is the best partner for businesses during this transformative time. We bring a powerful combination of deep CX and AI experience to provide capabilities that allow CX teams to be more efficient and empathetic. This improves customer and employee satisfaction and delivers cost efficiencies and revenue growth.”

AI Voice Interactions Set to be a Game-changer in Customer Service

AI for Voice in the customer service industry is a massive performance hack. It can enable a team of 300 support agents with excellent conversational AI capabilities to handle millions of interactions in a year. With the new features, AI for Voice by Zendesk would provide an intelligent self-trained ecosystem for assistants to capture and analyze customer interactions. Companies can create an Alexa or Siri-like experience with their voice assistants to reach diverse customer groups who prefer hands-free interaction. Moreover, international and domestic call centers can deploy an IVR-based system of chatbots and IVAs for multi-language customer support channels. It would enhance the quality of service with personalized recommendations and data analytics related to customer relationships and their sentiments.

With these Zendesk AI enhancements, agents can resolve requests faster and more consistently with contextually similar tickets. Additionally, admins can review AI-provided intent suggestions that address gaps in answers and adjust the bot tone to be more casual or professional to stay consistent with the brand persona.

Enterprise-grade Data Protection and Privacy Infrastructure

Good data infrastructure is a critical factor driving organizational success. Fraudulent calls, deep fake voices, robo-scams, and other malicious activities have put contact centers under the scanner. The industry loses millions of dollars annually due to fraud and data protection-related issues. Zendesk AI capabilities will safeguard contact centers and customers from losing their monies to fraud and dark web activities.

As the demand for AI-driven and personalized experiences grows, companies have understood that data security across the customer journey is an important task. As part of Zendesk’s commitment to trust and security, the company provides auditability, encryption, and business resilience and a variety of certifications, including FedRAMP and ISO certifications and compliance controls to meet HIPAA and GDPR requirements.

Zendesk Generative AI capabilities are safely embedded and controlled using an enterprise-grade data protection framework. It helps to build a safe and trustworthy CX environment where owners can take complete control of customer data with BYOK encryption options. Key capabilities include real-time log access, advanced data retention, data masking, and advanced encryption to maintain high-level data privacy standards.

As part of this release, Zendesk AI is expanding intent detection to additional industries and use cases, including Insurance, Travel/Tourism, and more. Companies in these industries can now take common intents and edit them for their specific needs, such as detecting frequently asked questions by travelers and escalating to agents who can handle these issues.

These capabilities will help businesses manage rapidly evolving data requirements accelerated by advances in AI. As the industry continues to evolve, Zendesk is committed to guiding companies through changing regulations and ensuring control and flexibility over how customer data is managed.

“There is a lot of value and power that generative AI and LLMs promise for businesses. However, we must set an example on building CX responsibly and guide our customers to reduce risk,” said Cristina Fonseca, Head of AI, Zendesk. “In line with our security principles and privacy framework, we have built-in safeguards and control for companies to set limits for bots. For example, when sensitive information (such as medical history) comes up, an agent must be brought into the customer conversation.”

What’s Next for Generative AI in CX in 2024

Everyone will remember 2023 as the year of ChatGPT. Zendesk, like HubSpot, Salesforce, and others, chose to scale its AI foundations by partnering with OpenAI. The partnership is the backbone of Zendesk Generative AI capabilities for CX offerings. As we head into the new year, we should expect GenAI to become more advanced and cutting-edge for bot deployment, voice, intelligent triage, and other services and solutions.

Watch out for our Predictions Series as we bring you top insights and forecasts from the industry.

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