Zendesk launches AI tech, conversational commerce features to improve CX offering

Singapore – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zendesk has announced new artificial intelligence (AI) technology and conversational commerce features in order to improve its customer experience (CX) offering across its user base. The announcement follows the recent conclusion of Zendesk’s flagship conference ‘Relate’.

‘Zendesk AI’, the company’s new AI tech feature, is an intelligence layer that makes personalised, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences (CX) accessible for all companies. This new AI feature comes after Zendesk’s recent partnership with OpenAI.

Some of the capabilities of Zendesk AI include advanced bots that automatically solve issues and provide more personalised, industry-specific and accurate responses; improved agent productivity through AI-powered insights and suggestions to arm agents with more knowledge and context; and intelligent triage using capabilities such as intent and language detection and sentiment analysis to classify customer requests and allow teams to respond accordingly.

Available today, Zendesk AI will help companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create seamless interactions. The solution continues to learn over time, is fast to deploy, easy to use, and immediately adds value without the need for large teams of developers or months of implementation time.

Cristina Fonseca, head of AI at Zendesk, said, “While running and scaling a successful CX team is complex, using AI should be simple. “With Zendesk AI, our proprietary models are specifically trained for CX and designed to immediately deliver actionable customer insights. These foundational features are key to improving customer service quality and agent efficiency, with potential to be even more powerful when combined with [large language models] LLMs.”

Meanwhile, Zendesk’s conversational commerce is made possible through deepening its partnership with Meta’s WhatsApp and Shopify, to further enhance businesses’ CX strategies and empower them to create a better shopping journey for their customers.

The conversational commerce feature provides direct support, marketing, and sales all from within a conversation, such as the capability for agents to leverage knowledge about customers’ ongoing shopping habits/status to personalise their service; identify new revenue opportunities by understanding any shopper’s habits and purchase history; and using AI to automate conversions and recommendations.

Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, commented, “While we’ve seen huge shifts in the way people shop over the past few years, one thing has remained constant – people prefer to communicate via messaging. Now that digital is the new storefront, businesses will be able to use conversational commerce, built on our powerful messaging platform, to create a richer, more dynamic and interactive experience with their customers, which will ultimately lead to increased loyalty and revenue.”