Zendesk Advanced AI is quickly becoming a game changer in customer service technology. And here to talk with me about how this powerful artificial intelligence tool is transforming the way businesses provide customer support is Brandon Tidd, Software Architect and Zendesk Guru at 729 Solutions.
By the end of this video, you will learn:
- How will Zendesk Advanced AI revolutionize the customer service industry?
- How does Zendesk Advanced AI leverage machine learning to enhance customer support?
- What are some of the key benefits of using Zendesk Advanced AI for customer service teams?
- How does Zendesk Advanced AI contribute to reducing ticket volume and improving agent productivity?
- What sets Zendesk Advanced AI apart from other AI-powered customer service solutions in the market?
- How can customers integrate Zendesk Advanced AI into their existing accounts?
- How can businesses get started with Zendesk Advanced AI, and what support and resources are available?
- How will Zendesk Advanced AI evolve in the future to further enhance customer service capabilities?
- How can people learn more about Zendesk AI and what it can do to help improve their customer service strategy?
Video Transcript
James: Thanks for joining me, Brandon.
Brandon: Good to be here.
How will Zendesk Advanced AI revolutionize the customer service industry?
James: So let’s dive right in. Tell us about Zendesk Advanced AI and how it’s set to revolutionize the customer service industry.
Brandon: So I think anybody that’s been paying attention in the industry for the past six months knows that Chat GPT and generative AI has really been transformational across a wide variety of industries.
And customer service is one of those industries that’s poised to be just fundamentally changed and inherently improved with some of the adaption of this new technology.
Now, the first thing everybody thinks of when we say “AI” is they’re coming for the jobs, they’re going to replace the human. We’re going to just be talking to robots for the rest of our time.
And while some of that may be true in certain industries, Zendesk vehemently believes that the human in the loop is part of that conversation. You still need the human guardrails now and in the future because customer service is still a human powered industry.
That said, it could be supercharged with AI and what a lot of companies have done is they’ve taken the AI and they’ve taken it and showed the end user facing side of the conversation to the AI so they’ve introduced conversational AI where you’re talking with the bot what is doing with their Advanced AI modules is there supplementing the agent’s knowledge and enhancing the agent experience for the person on the back end on the other end of that conversation.
And that’s something unique. I haven’t seen any others take that approach yet.
How does Zendesk Advanced AI leverage machine learning to enhance customer support?
James: That’s a perfect segue into the next question here. It is a little bit, you know, kind of technical, I guess, and I’m not sure you’ll be able to answer it, but I’m curious about how Zendesk Advanced AI leverages machine learning to understand common customer issues and provide, you know, those insights for agents.
Brandon: Yeah, so this is where Zendesk really stands up because they are the gold standard of customer service. They’re used by 170, 000 customers worldwide. And they have 18 billion points of data to train that AI on. So it’s not like they’re new at this! And once you combine all of that power and put it into the hands of the people who know what to do with it, people far smarter than myself, you end up with a product that really has the ability to transform the way agents interact with the ticketing system.
So whether that’s summarizing the details of the ticket to detecting the sentiment of the ticket, to generating responses that are on brand for your company, based on your previous responses. So what Zendesk will do is over time, it will learn how you talk to the customers and learning your voice of the customer service and adapt its generative predictive text technology based on how you’ve previously responded to other tickets, in your own instance, and it’s very, very cool.
What are some of the key benefits of using Zendesk Advanced AI for customer service teams?
James: That’s absolutely incredible. You’re kind of alluding to some benefits of using Zendesk Advanced AI. Are there any other, you know, key benefits for customer service teams to implement and start utilizing this tool?
Brandon: Yeah, I think just a saving time and effort, especially for your new hires and smaller teams that don’t have the bandwidth to generate, you know, hundreds of macros layering in that, AI intelligence on top of what you’re already doing with customer service is only going to enhance the experience.
Not only for your agents and being able to respond to customers quicker, be able to triage and prioritize conversations in a, in a more strategic capacity, by being able to detect sentiment, but also give your end users a better experience with your product because you are able to respond. More intelligently and more thoroughly than just maybe a quick one answer response.
Now, the AI is going so far as generating the response and drafting the response in your voice for you, but you still have that human in the loop to keep the guardrails on, keep it brand safe and make sure that the AI is not hallucinating or just imagining things about your brand that don’t exist. Because as we all know that brand safety is huge when it comes to AI.
How does Zendesk Advanced AI contribute to reducing ticket volume and improving agent productivity?
James: Yeah, absolutely. And especially when it comes to customer service as well, you spoke a little bit about the smaller teams and, customer service and reducing ticket volume, and increasing agent productivity is probably top of mind for many companies.
Brandon: Yeah, especially in a post pandemic world where efficiency is key and teams are spread in remote and hybrid work environments, you don’t always have the benefit of that shared knowledge pool of being able to be sitting side by side with your colleagues or, you know, having a room full of customer service agents that are willing and able to assist with those rarely asked questions, you know, that’s something that we’ve seen come out of this is everybody knows the answer to the frequently asked questions or the FAQs. But what about the “RAQs”? What about the rarely asked questions? The AI has the ability to learn over time that even if you answer a question once or twice, the AI can pick up on that and start to infuse that into the macros and generate macros for your Zendesk Admins to review and insert into the programming for your agents to then respond to.
So even if it’s not generative the first time, it could be generative the second or third time and then that could lead to more efficiency down the road.
James: That really is cool. I mean, that really is a tool to increase efficiency.
Brandon: Yeah, for sure.
James: Is there anything? Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
What sets Zendesk Advanced AI apart from other AI-powered customer service solutions in the market?
Brandon: I think what sets Zendesk Advanced AI apart from other AI powered customer service solutions in the market is there’s so many of Zendesk competitors and other players in the market are so much focused on having the AI talk to the end users direct and they’re really, um, can I say “hell bent”? Uh, they’re, they’re really driven to remove the human from the equation because they feel, you know, we’ve heard anecdotal stories about companies who’ve laid off their entire workforce because they’re are convinced the AI can do the job better.
And I think that’s short sighted. I think at the end of the day, you really need to see the human in the loop is being part of that conversation and having that AI efficiency allows and frees up your customer service team to be more efficient and more deliberate about how they’re spending their time with customers.
We’ve talked previously about CX becoming a profit center, opposed to just a cost suck and at the end of the day, AI enables you to spend more time with the customers that are more likely to convert to sales, are more likely to upgrade, where it becomes less transactional and truly more conversational and more about the customer and that’s something that Zendesk is just… they’re very, very focused on keeping that agent interaction at the forefront of the conversation.
How can customers integrate Zendesk Advanced AI into their existing accounts?
James: For current Zendesk customers, how can they start integrating Zendesk Advanced AI into their existing accounts?
Brandon: Yeah. So for “Suite Pro” and above, there is an add on that’s available. It comes, at the time of this taping, $50 per agent, per month. And so it is a little bit pricier than some of the add ons we’ve seen from Zendesk over the years, but in terms of dollar for dollar efficiencies that you gain from adding in that layer of efficiency, both we and Zendesk are convinced that it will pay for itself over time as it learns your system, it learns your particular tickets and the way you talk to customers that allows you to better handle customer service requests more efficiently and prioritize the conversations that really, truly matter.
How can businesses get started with Zendesk Advanced AI, and what support and resources are available?
James: And for people that are starting to implement this, what kind of support and resources are available for implementation and training?
Brandon: From what we’ve seen so far, it’s very much flip a switch, and the AI just starts working for you. Obviously there’s partners like 729 Solutions that can help you dig into the details of it.
But also Zendesk has a lot of support articles and community resources available as well to help customers who are just getting started with their, some of their advanced modules and it’s available as a free trial. We should point that out as well.
How will Zendesk Advanced AI evolve in the future to further enhance customer service capabilities?
James: Break out your crystal ball, Brandon. It’s time for me to ask you to look into the future.
What are the long term plans for Zendesk Advanced AI and how do you envision it evolving in the future to further enhance customer service capabilities?
Brandon: I think that anybody who claims to prophesize beyond a couple of months out in this space right now is just making stuff up. I mean, let’s be honest, the industry is changing so fast.
There are so many companies out there that have come on to the scene that are going to be gone in six months. There’s going to be more companies on their heels that don’t even exist yet that are being started in basements and garages right now. It’s going to be really fascinating. I really liken this to the dot com bubble of the early 2000s, where hopefully, there won’t be as big of a bust at the end.
But, you know, there’s going to be a natural stabilizing of things. But I think that Zendesk was very smart to not only partner with Open AI, with some of their technology, but also do it in a way that was brand safe and data safe. They really, because of the nature of Zendesk’s business, being trusted with the data of 170, 000 customers, they couldn’t just flip the switch and say, “Yeah, let’s turn on generative AI for everybody.” They really had to do their due diligence, which is why we’re seeing this start in very specific verticals and categories.
I think over time, as more people use the tool and give feedback, Zendesk will continue to iterate and leverage AI where it makes .
Where I see some of the value, and if I had to predict specifically for Zendesk, where you’d start to see AI enhancements, I’d look at some of the other aspects of the configuration from the Admin settings. Things that are very manual to configure right now, such as a bump solve automation or, you know, making sure that the trigger notifications are in the proper order.
Having an AI Admin on the back end I think would supplement some of the work that we do every day to help make our teams more efficient as Admins so that you don’t have to constantly babysit the back end of the system and you can spend more time focusing on those customer conversations.
James: Well, Brandon, thanks as always for joining me and for sharing your brilliant insights.
Brandon: Of course.
How can people learn more about Zendesk AI and what it can do to help improve their customer service strategy?
James: Brandon Tidd is a Software Architect and Zendesk Guru at 729 Solutions. Schedule a free consultation with Brandon now to speak with him about Zendesk Advanced AI and explore its potential benefits for your organization.
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