Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Zendesk has announced new AI-powered features aimed at enhancing customer and employee service experiences through its platform. These advancements include AI agents available across various digital and voice channels, a customizable AI agent builder, and improved capabilities for handling complex interactions, including a new agent copilot tool that anticipates customer needs and provides real-time insights. The platform also introduces enhanced AI-powered insights for analyzing customer conversations and optimizing workflows, alongside a bold shift to an outcome-based pricing model that aligns revenue with the effectiveness of AI interactions. This strategic focus on AI and data preparation is designed to enhance customer satisfaction and support organizations in efficiently addressing both simple and complex service issues.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Zendesk has launched new AI features designed to enhance both self-service and human agent interactions, with AI agents now available across all digital and voice channels to automate resolutions.
- Zendesk’s AI agent builder allows businesses to easily customize and deploy AI agents, while improved capabilities enable bots to handle complex interactions and assist human agents more effectively.
- Zendesk is introducing AI-powered insights for analyzing customer conversations and optimizing workflows, along with a quality assurance feature that monitors performance across all touchpoints.
- The company is shifting to an outcome-based pricing model for AI interactions, linking revenue to the effectiveness of its AI technology, which aims to enhance customer satisfaction and reduce operational risks.
The News: Zendesk has launched new AI features designed to enhance both self-service and human agent interactions, with AI agents now available across all digital and voice channels to automate resolutions. The company made several other AI-focused announcements at its inaugural Zendesk AI Summit in New York, where it reinforced its messaging around the company’s expertise at delivering AI agents that can fully resolve issues with no human intervention.
Will Zendesk’s New AI Tools Deliver Better Service to Customers and Workers?
Analyst Take: Customer experience software vendor Zendesk made several announcements focused on the availability of new AI-powered features within its core platform. Focused on delivering both fully digital, self-service interactions and human agent experiences assisted by AI tools, Zendesk’s approach to AI is both thoughtful and prudent, given the nascent state of the technology and the cautious nature of most organizations around trusting and using the technology in full production environments.
The company’s new technology announcements encompassed the following features and capabilities:
- AI Agents Available Across All Channels: Zendesk is making its AI agents available on all digital channels, as well as voice, to help drive automated resolutions across all channels. The company’s use of bots isn’t restricted to self-service interactions; these bots are also capable of working alongside human agents to help them solve customer issues.
- Builder Available to Customize and Manage AI Agents: Zendesk announced the availability of a new AI agent builder that makes it easy for businesses to set up AI agents and add controls. Zendesk says agents can be more quickly customized and rolled out, reducing time to value and ensuring they adhere to brand guidelines.
- More Capability to Handle Complex Interactions: Zendesk says that its bots are capable of generating replies that can address more sophisticated issues with customizable conversation flows across all channels. It also announced the ability to automate up to 50% of voice interactions through a new partnership with Poly.ai, ensuring seamless, consistent support across channels.
The ability to handle more complex interactions is also extended to agent copilot, Zendesk AI’s tool for helping human agents resolve customer service issues quickly and more efficiently. Zendesk says that agent copilot is now capable of anticipating customer needs, offering proactive recommendations and taking actions autonomously with the now generally available “auto assist” mode.
Agent copilots are also able to follow specific processes on behalf of an agent and instantly sync changes to ensure agents are always following the latest procedures with the new copilot business procedures.
Agent copilot for voice (available 1H 2025) will be able to provide instant call insights such as customer sentiment and intent, plus quickly surface answers from the knowledge base, helping organizations resolve more complex issues via voice by providing relevant information directly to the agent in real time. - More AI-Powered Insights: Zendesk is introducing more AI-powered insights to analyze customer conversations across systems, extract valuable key insights, and enable real-time business intelligence, via enhanced intents and entity detection, enabling faster and more personalized resolutions.
Zendesk AI also enables organizations to proactively design and refine workflows using out-of-the-box insights delivered through a new intelligent triage dashboard, ensuring critical issues are efficiently routed and automated.
Finally, Quality Assurance can be deployed across every touchpoint, including voice and AI agents, to automatically analyze and optimize customer conversations and agent performance.
Leveraging AI and Agents to Resolve More Complex Issues
AI and automation are no-brainers for resolving simple and repetitive customer service issues, such as providing answers to commonly asked questions, handling standard service requests such as product returns, or adding or deleting features from a service. The real value from automation is delivered when more complex tasks can be either fully automated, or agents can be provided with the relevant information to help them take action on a customer’s query quickly, without a lot of back-and-forth.
Today’s customers expect basic questions to be handled by bots, for the most part, and ultimately judge a company’s service and support performance on how well it handles the more complex queries and problems. After all, most customer frustration with service issues usually revolves around a customer not being able to fully grasp the intent of a more complex query, or getting bounced around the customer service department because a particular agent doesn’t have the information or authority to quickly handle an issue.
Zendesk is spending a lot of time and resources on intent detection and resolution, to help organizations feel they can confidently deploy AI agents to handle or assist agents with the complex interactions that take more time to resolve, ultimately leading to better overall customer satisfaction.
Outcome-Based Pricing Remains Zendesk’s Most Compelling Aspect
Perhaps the most interesting news coming out of Zendesk was barely touched upon at its AI summit. Zendesk announced it would be moving to an outcome-based pricing model for AI interactions, which directly ties Zendesk’s revenue performance and growth to the effectiveness of its AI technology to resolve issues and drive better outcomes.
It is a bold approach, but I believe it is a winning model. Zendesk’s approach of leveraging its vast amount of process data to inform, train, and ground AI agents is a great foundation for delivering real value from AI, and the latest announcements around a tool that can be used to quickly customize and point these agents at the right data likely will help the company ensure its agents can actually resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
Zendesk’s AI success is ultimately also partially dependent upon its ability to ensure its customers’ data is available and properly prepared for AI agents to access and act upon it. Zendesk must work with its customers, as well as its implementation partners, to ensure that this crucial step of data preparation is not ignored. Failing to do so will ultimately result in challenges around getting AI agents to deliver expected results.
What to Watch:
- Zendesk’s focus on using AI agents to deliver self-service experiences and human agents should help it appeal to customers that are taking a stepwise approach to rolling out greater automation for service use cases.
- Zendesk needs to continue to tell its story around data safety, governance, and privacy. This is increasingly important as the company builds out additional integrations and connectors to other systems.
- Zendesk’s outcome-based pricing model should be a winner in the market, particularly as organizations seek to reduce headcount for certain service functions, and drive ROI from AI-powered, self-service experiences. Aligning customers’ end goal of driving more successful outcomes with a pricing model that reduces risk is a winning message in the market.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Zendesk Ventures Launches Fund to Drive AI-First CX Innovation
Zendesk Announces Outcome-based Pricing Model for AI Agents
Enterprising Insights, Episode 22 – Zendesk and Avaya Analyst Day Recaps
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
