Connections

Zendesk used its latest What’s New webinar to highlight its top innovation developments of the past quarter, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI).

During the webinar, the company discussed its latest product updates and new releases, and shared best practices spanning across the entire Zendesk platform.

Zendesk also took a deep dive into the ever-evolving role of AI in the customer experience (CX) landscape.

The company started off with some of its latest announcements from its showcase event in London, including Zendesk’s big investments in AI.

Zendesk then covered what’s new in its product areas of AI-powered conversational experiences, open and flexible platform, and trust and security.

“Over the past three months, it’s been incredible connecting in person again with customers,” Palomi Batra, director of product marketing at Zendesk, said early in the webinar.
“At our live event series, we’ve had events in six different countries with 40 unique sessions and over 10,000 in-person and virtual attendees,” she said.

“In addition, we’ve also had some really big announcements,” she pointed out. “If you couldn’t attend in person, don’t worry. You are in the right place and we’ll catch you up here today.”

One thing she said has been “coming up frequently with our customers is how to manage a company’s most valuable asset: its people.”

On that note, she said: “There’s a good chance you’ve asked yourself questions I’ve used before: How do I forecast staffing needs for my agents? What are my agents doing and how productive are they?”

Tymeshift, Open AI

She pointed out: “As a trusted partner, companies like yours are turning to Zendesk. For years, we’ve heard requests to help with building team schedules, predicting future workloads, and reporting on capacity and performance of your agents. And now we’re at the point where we have some really exciting news to share with you all. In case you missed it, we have a new addition to the family.”

That new addition is Tymeshift, an AI workforce management (WFM) solution that Zendesk recently acquired. Tymeshift, built exclusively for Zendesk customers, simplifies the management of complex CX workloads, according to Zendesk.

Tymeshift is the “fastest way to manage your agent schedule” with Zendesk, providing AI-powered demand forecasting, automatic agent scheduling, and “reporting on [a] team’s performance,” Batra said.

There is a “long history of collaboration” between Tymeshift and Zendesk, she noted, saying they “have been working together for years, and there’s already a huge base of customers using the two tools together…. Acquiring Tymeshift is a part of our commitment to investing in exceptional experiences for customer service teams.”

Using Tymeshift, teams can accurately forecast a firm’s staffing needs and reduce overtime costs by 80 percent, according to Zendesk. It can also reduce scheduled creation time by 70 percent and then analyze agent activity to see if things happened as planned, which can reduce agent idle time by 50%, Zendesk says.

Free 10-day Tymeshift trials are being offered by the company, Batra pointed out.

She went on to tell viewers that if they didn’t attend the company’s Relate conference in May and see its big announcements there, “we launched Zendesk AI and the advanced AI add-on, an intelligence layer that makes personalized, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences and employee experiences accessible for all businesses.”

Zendesk AI, which she said was built on the world’s largest CX specific data set, “continuously learns from every customer interaction and allows companies like yours to better assist customers…. Zendesk already provides some AI and bot capabilities within our suite offerings today, including our standard bots.”

Now, with the advanced AI add-on, it “unlocks a bunch of new AI capabilities, starting with Intelligent Triage, which eliminates the need for manual triage,” she said. “Incoming requests are automatically tagged with the customer’s intent, sentiment and language. This opens up a whole world of streamlined workflows. We also have Advanced Bots, which can help you level up your bot game. Our advanced bots can pre-train, which means they can understand the intent of your customers from the get-go, and then routes them to the correct part where bots flow for quicker resolutions.”

Two other new capabilities are Macro Suggestions for Admin, which she said “provide smarter recommendations for new macros to create for your team and, then, last but not least, we have AI-powered tools for agents,” which she said helps “boost agent productivity.”

Also announced at Relate was Zendesk’s partnership with OpenAI that she said is “giving agents superpowers.”

Zendesk is offering three new generative AI tools for agents, which she said are all available within their centralised and easy to use agent workspace. Customers eligible for the advanced AI add-on can sign up to participate in Zendesk’s early access program, she noted.

The three tools part of the OpenAI collaboration are: Summarize, which creates a quick set of bullets to help agents understand a ticket faster; Expand, which transforms a brief text into a fully complete reply so agents can respond more quickly; and Tone Shift that she said lets agents instantly adjust the tone of their message to sound either more warm/friendly or formal.

What’s New with AI conversational experiences

Turning to what’s new with AI-powered conversational experiences, Ridhima Nagalia, product marketing manager at Zendesk, said: “This year, we introduced AI-powered advanced bots with pre-train intents and more board improvements to install on your web pages to enable digital voice calling for escalations that require a human touch. This quarter, our core focus has been to bring capabilities for you that will help you scale your service while keeping conversations personalized and humanlike – just how your customers want you to interact with them.”

She added: “We get it. It’s difficult to stay relevant in this economy. Meeting customer needs is more important than ever before. Customers not only want their conversations with their favorite brands to be easy, but also quick and personalized to them, and these fluent conversations are not a one-time thing. As a business owner, you need to think about how every interaction with your customer can offer the same personal touch and lead to a resolution in record time. That’s why utilizing AI and bots is more important than ever before.”
Zendesk wrapped up the webinar with ways to learn more through its community events and a Q&A with company product experts.