Zendesk has acquired technology provider Unleash to integrate AI search capabilities into its customer services offerings.
By implementing its capabilities within Zendesk’s system, this tool can explore accessible internal company knowledge across systems.
This acquisition aims to give both customer enterprise employees and service teams access to fast, secure, and accurate answers to improve internal workflows.
Due to the amount of capabilities expected in customer service today, CX teams are relying on knowledge across various tools, data, and teams. And with scattered data and key information, finding accurate knowledge slows down resolution times and increases support efforts and overall costs.
However, Unleash offers enterprises connectivity options to over 70 data sources, allowing teams to retrieve data from one place.
This acquisition will enable Zendesk to utilize unified knowledge retrieval in workflows to improve efficiency with customer-facing teams.
Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering, and AI at Zendesk, highlighted how AI should be used to enhance in-company employees by offering quick, secure access to information to support reliable support experiences.
“As organizations rapidly adopt AI, rethinking how they deliver internal employee support is becoming mission-critical,” he explained.
“Zendesk’s acquisition of Unleash puts AI directly in the flow of work, delivering secure, permission-based answers from across company systems so employees get instant self-service with seamless handoffs to human experts when needed.”
The acquisition allows Zendesk to unify this disorganized data by surfacing the relevant, up-to-date information from across these systems using Unleash’s advanced AI enterprise search and knowledge retrieval capabilities.
These capabilities include:
Unified Enterprise Search
By indexing content from various internal systems into one searchable layer, service teams can access all relevant information within one place to decrease tool switching and researching.
This also improves response speed and consistency, as well as reducing frustration and handle times.
Permission-based Retrieval
This allows enterprises to limit access to information and data retrieval, avoiding team members accessing private or sensitive information and supporting compliance.
By embedding this capability within the tool, agents can only access information set within the rules implemented by the company.
This capability limits the risk of data leakage between agent and customer, reducing the chance of unapproved users accessing incorrect or restricted information.
AI Knowledge Answers
Through AI, enterprises can use this capability to understand queries and retrieve relevant data for accurate responses.
It utilizes intent analysis and searches approved systems to provide intelligent responses through internal knowledge.
This allows service teams to respond faster and provide contextual knowledge to internal-based questions.
Workflow-embedded Delivery
Answers and knowledge are now accessible directly inside the already-implemented tool.
For service teams, these tools can include Zendesk, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, meaning that agents are not required to leave their current workspace to research other systems.
This enables improved focus time during customer handling and reduces context switching irritation.
Scalable Connectors
These are pre-built integrations that link various internal systems together to ensure that multiple systems stay up-to-date on current information.
This is done through continuous content syncing through tools and platforms that are already collaborating with the systems, reducing the need for manual system updates.
This allows services teams to access relevant resources confidently with the latest approved information and fewer knowledge gaps.
Reducing Effort and Increasing Reliability
This platform acquisition allows Zendesk to consistently support customer experience by tackling service failures without manual research.
Customers are now expecting faster, accurate, and consistent support across all communication channels. This can become a result of internal team and enterprise friction, gaps in knowledge, slow handoffs, and agent uncertainty.
By acquiring Unleash, Zendesk can allow service teams to deliver consistent service outcomes with higher trust levels, even in periods of peak interaction volumes.
Regarding effort reduction, these capabilities are expected to strengthen Zendesk’s platform by utilizing AI agents with end-to-end context.
This allows employee and service teams to deliver high-impact service support while also adhering to enterprises’ policies and expectations regarding security and privacy, as well as staying current with security and compliance trends.
This acquisition also allows customers to feel confident in their sensitive data and how it’s being managed.
With increasing expectations around customer data handling, enterprises are going to be looking for vendors who can provide strong security and privacy protection.
Who are Unleash?
Unleash is a platform that utilizes AI to offer knowledge retrieval from various internal systems, allowing users to access information from a single place.
Founded in 2019, this platform indexes from various corporate sources such as Google Drive, SharePoint, and Slack.
Data gathering can include – past interactions, policies, resolution history, documentation, and support tickets.
It also follows current security and compliance expectations within the industry, allowing enterprises to input customized restrictions against service teams on data access to ensure sensitive information isn’t accidentally released.
These capabilities allow teams to access information quickly to increase response times.
Itay Itzhaki, Co-founder and CEO at Unleash, explained how this acquisition will allow Zendesk customer teams to access the correct information whenever they need it, whilst also adhering to privacy and security expectations.
“This acquisition aligns directly with our mission to make information accessible and actionable right where work happens,” he said.
“Our AI-powered search and retrieval technology will help companies deliver faster, smarter employee support by making knowledge easier to access and use – all while keeping security and privacy at the forefront.”
