After an eventful few months, Zendesk continues to upgrade its portfolio, with the latest round of updates being two AI capabilities added to its customer support platform.
Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist aim to streamline the process of sorting customer support requests and offer more data on these requests.
The capabilities ensure that business-critical requests are made a top priority to agents and be resolved quickly.
In addition, agents can now understand intent and sentiment via account-specific models customized for individual use cases.
In efforts to “create accessible CX AI for companies of all sizes”, Zendesk released the capabilities that leverage machine learning from trillions of customer data points and sort them by vertical markets.
As a result, users can create more personalised interactions and deliver better experiences.
Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer, 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 involved. These models come ready to use instantly, and continue to learn over time and become customized to each company’s operations by continuously incorporating feedback.”
Smart Assist provides the next-best recommendations to agents in real-time, improving coaching and training opportunities. Both capabilities can self-boost accuracy as they receive feedback on predictions and recommendations.
When it comes to sensitive data, the capabilities extract information such as names, addresses or phone numbers for use in workflows.
It seems like the latest AI additions to Zendesk’s portfolio aim to support the human side of customer interactions rather than boosting chatbot features. Indeed, recent Zendesk research revealed that customers are still frustrated with chatbots, blaming AI for making their lives ‘harder’.
Building on this point, 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.”
