Zendesk has announced Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, new AI solutions empowering businesses to triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale. By democratizing access to these solutions, companies can see value in minutes by understanding intent and sentiment through account-specific, data-driven models that are customized for individual use cases and drive faster resolutions.
Industry analysts predict that in the near term, AI will touch the majority of customer service interactions, but Zendesk research shows less than a half of Indian companies (47%) are currently using AI to help their service teams become more efficient. That’s in part because even as AI technology has rapidly improved in the last five years, software vendors haven’t yet passed those improvements on to their customers and are still selling expensive AI solutions that are extremely time-consuming to set up.
“Businesses in India need technology that makes the customer journey seamless, agile and efficient. However, our recent CX Accelerator report shows only 26% of Indian companies say that more than 70% of their conversations are addressed by chatbots,” said Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, SVP India & SAARC, Zendesk. “Our latest solutions are easy-to-set-up and can be customized to suit CX strategies of businesses across the board. At a time when customer service requests are skyrocketing, businesses need a unified intelligent platform that reduces the burden on support teams while paving the way for better and more personalized conversations.”
Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist are the next step in Zendesk’s vision to create accessible CX AI for companies of all sizes. The technology uses proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and applies a vertical lens. This creates models custom to each business capable of identifying the intent, language and sentiment of each customer interaction.
This unique approach to applying machine learning creates more personalized and informed interactions to better serve customers. For example, specific inquiries, such as “I’m having problems with payment”, can be automatically sent to an agent who is equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution, while inquiries that include language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way will indicate a highly negative sentiment and be routed to the top of the queue.
“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,” said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer, Zendesk. “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.”
Zendesk analysis shows that 80% of inquiries can be narrowed down to only 20 issues. That knowledge is incredibly powerful when looking to streamline and improve CX processes.
“I’m a big fan of anything that makes customer experiences better, and the ability to triage requests is a foundational element, not only for CX efficiency, but also for customer satisfaction,” said Shelly Kramer, founding partner, Futurum research. “Zendesk’s AI tools nail it when it comes to the ability to quickly and easily determine customers’ intent and sentiment, allowing for quick routing to the right agent and speedy identification of areas where processes can be improved. This ensures the speedy (sometimes instantaneous) resolution of customer issues, helps the customer service team remain agile (especially during busy times like the holiday season), and delivers bottom line business benefits in terms of hours/costs saved. There’s nothing not to like about this new functionality.”
“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,” said Cristina Fonseca, vice president of product, Zendesk.
