Transforming the customer service landscape with generative AI

Over the last year, there’s been a lot of talk around generative AI and its potential to improve the customer experience (CX). In fact, two-thirds of consumers believe that generative AI will soon become an important part of their service experiences.

Generative AI refers to an AI model that returns or generates outputs based on prompts—these outputs can include text, images, videos, code, or audio. When applied to customer service, generative AI can improve personalization efforts, reduce resolution times, or even create more conversational experiences between customers and bots. As a result, companies can meet customers’ rising expectations.

We’re delighted to broaden our Zendesk AI offering with the integration of elevated generative AI capabilities. From optimized bots to knowledge base enhancements, this suite of capabilities unlocks untapped potential, enabling businesses to deliver effortless service experiences and attain higher customer satisfaction. Learn about our latest innovations below, and click here for more details on our AI capabilities.

Generative AI for bots: Make conversations more human-like and natural

Generative replies for more effective self-service

Building, managing, and training bots has long been a time-consuming task for customer service admins. Even if hundreds of workflows are set up to respond to customer queries, it’s still likely that bots might not understand every customer question, ultimately creating friction within the customer experience.

With generative replies, bots can automatically understand the customer query, sift through the linked help center, and surface the right information in a synthesized format, all on their own. The best part: Generative replies are ready to use with a click of a button—no coding or developer support required. This eliminates the training and maintenance associated with setting up and managing conversation bots. And with an all-new intents dashboard, agents can easily choose the topics that should be automated with generative replies, enabling admins to save a significant amount of time.

This feature can be incredibly helpful for businesses of all sizes, allowing them to scale effortlessly while ensuring customer satisfaction. For instance, generative replies can be used to expand bot coverage to answer frequently asked customer questions, as long as the help center is up to date. Just add articles for the most common customer topics, and the bot will automatically use information from the help center articles to answer those questions. This enables businesses to scale their support—without the need for additional headcount—and enhance the customer experience.

Reflect brand personality with a bot persona

On top of generative replies, a bot persona allows businesses to reflect their brand’s personality across all conversations between bots and customers, reinforcing their brand and ultimately improving CX.

These bot personas determine the style of expression applied to an AI-generated message, giving businesses a consistent voice. Users can select a persona for their bots (professional, friendly, or playful), and choose up to 20 emojis that bots can use in their responses.

For businesses trying to differentiate themselves from their competitors, extending brand personality to bots can be extremely advantageous. It creates service consistency across channels and locations, which helps customers form more meaningful connections with a specific brand.

Generative AI for knowledge bases: Craft content faster

For support agents, building and updating help center articles is a time-consuming task, especially on top of their numerous other responsibilities. To address this, we launched a new feature that enables agents to quickly produce help center content. Agents just need to type a few bullet points, and generative AI can expand them into a full help center article. Support agents can also shift the tone of the article to make it more formal or casual, depending on the company’s brand.

This feature enables businesses to build and expand their knowledge base content efficiently while boosting the productivity of their support agents. Additionally, it ensures the proper tone is used in each article so the content resonates with customers.

Generative AI for agents: Enhance skills and productivity

When it comes to solving tickets, many agents spend their time trying to understand their customers’ situation and write the appropriate reply. Our slew of generative AI capabilities enhance agents’ productivity and skills so they can assist customers quickly and effectively.

For instance, generative AI can summarize a customer conversation for agents, saving them time and ultimately decreasing ticket resolution time. Agents can also confidently respond to customer queries with writing enhancement tools that help with response phrasing. They simply need to type a few words, and generative AI will expand on them to create a fully fleshed out reply. Agents can even adjust the tone of their response to make it more friendly or formal.

Generative AI for voice: Improve efficiency

Our last generative AI feature saves agents from needing to summarize calls, which can become rather time-consuming. This feature provides a full call transcript after every call, as well as a bulleted summary—helping agents reduce call wrap-up time and transition to their next task faster.

For retailers, especially during peak season, this feature is highly helpful for call center agents, who spend on average 17 percent of their time on wrap-up calls, according to Zendesk research. As a result, this feature boosts agent efficiency and productivity, empowering them to focus on assisting customers instead of on administrative tasks.

Embrace the future of customer service

The use of generative AI presents a leap forward in overhauling customer service experiences. Our latest features are set to leverage this potential, leading to improved agent productivity and enriched customer experiences. As we march toward a future where customer satisfaction is paramount, AI could well hold the key to unlocking unprecedented levels of agent efficiency and customer service excellence.