At its recent AI Summit, Zendesk introduced a series of innovations including AI-powered agents for omnichannel support, enhanced agent copilot, powerful voice, and agent builder.

Zendesk also announced a new fully featured voice solution that delivers unified and elevated customer support at every step of the call journey. This means agents can deliver faster, personalised, and more human conversations, as well as the ability to solve more complex cases. Now, customers can speak naturally with an adaptable 24/7 AI Agent for voice and resolve issues autonomously, only escalating to talk to a human as needed.

Zendesk CEO, Tom Eggemeier said, “AI is now bridging the gap between high quality service, at a lower cost, while delivering more personalised experiences. Our latest innovations, including voice AI, assist human agents in working efficiently alongside AI to deliver tailored, efficient service. This partnership leads to faster issue resolution, higher customer satisfaction and provides valuable business insights.”

Zendesk Australia and New Zealand country leader, Kellie Hackney added, “Many of the business leaders we speak to tell us their customer service teams are under more pressure than ever to meet heightened customer expectations and the growing volume of customer service interactions.

“With 87% of Australian CX leaders believing the volume of customer service interactions will increase five times by 2027, companies need to look at ways to become leaner, faster, and more effective through AI. At a time when a customer’s experience can make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line, we’re excited to bring these new AI capabilities, empowering human agents to work more efficiently and helping them deliver faster, personalised and streamlined customer experiences.”

Zendesk is enhancing agent copilot with capabilities that are available for all companies to deliver consistent, high-quality service. In more complex, high-value interactions between human agents and customers, agent copilot can now anticipate customer needs, offer proactive recommendations, and take actions autonomously; follow specific processes on behalf of an agent and instantly sync changes, and surface relevant issues and proactive insights directly within the new AI-powered workspace.

As part of the enhancements, agent copilot for voice now provides instant call insights such as customer sentiment and intent, plus quickly surfaces answers from the knowledge base.

Zendesk is making AI agents ​​available on all channels, including voice, ensuring that these autonomous bots can work independently or alongside human agents in resolving customer issues. A new AI agent builder makes it easy to set up AI agents and add controls. 

These new capabilities for Zendesk AI agents allow companies to tap into the full benefits of AI by delivering instant, accurate responses with generative replies and customisable conversation flows, now extended to email; automating up to 50% of voice interactions in a new partnership with Poly.ai, and creating and controlling AI agents using AI agent builder, requiring zero training and offering full customisation.

With improved AI-driven insights, companies can now quickly uncover why customers are reaching out with granular details through enhanced intents and entity detection; proactively design and refine workflows using out-of-the-box insights from the new intelligent triage dashboard and use quality assurance across every touchpoint to automatically analyse and optimise customer conversations and agent performance.