Customer experience software company Zendesk is all-in on generative AI: In 2021, it acquired Cleverly, a Lisbon-based CX automation startup. In April 2023, it announced a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. And on Wednesday, it unveiled Zendesk AI, an “intelligence layer” using the company’s in-house large language model (LLM), which it claims is trained on the “world’s largest CX-specific dataset.”
Zendesk AI, unveiled at the Zendesk Relate conference in San Francisco, adds capabilities including advanced chatbots, AI-generated content, and tools designed to detect intent and analyze sentiment in conversations. Separately, Zendesk announced a handful of additional tools developed through its partnership with OpenAI, including response rephrasing and tone shifting.
Despite the hefty investment in AI automation, Zendesk isn’t planning on automating service representatives out of a job, Jon Aniano, SVP of product for CRM applications, said.
Instead, he’s confident these new AI tools will make CX teams more valuable to their companies—not replaceable.
“When we talk about automation in customer service, a lot of people leap ahead and say, ‘If we automate all of customer service, there won’t be customer service anymore,” Aniano said. “That’s pretty way off base from what I’ve seen in the industry…Currently, the demand for great customer experiences, for emotionally connected customer experience, far outstrips the supply, and automation will bring that back into balance, but it’s not going to eliminate it.”
Automating certain elements of the CX experience can free up a precious resource for companies: People to talk directly to their customers, Aniano said.
“What you’re actually doing is you’re creating more time and creating more mental capacity for your human agents to deliver…a better experience for the customer.”
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Pick your LLM: OpenAI’s powerful language models are the backbone of a new set of tools that Zendesk customers can opt in to use. Among other things, these tools can generate a summary of customer interactions and modify canned responses to make them sound more friendly or less formal, for example.
But there are some things Aniano says are better kept in-house.
“If you pick your LLM of choice today, you can ask it for the sentiment of an interaction, and it will give you a general sentiment with fairly good accuracy and fairly good confidence,” he explained. “The thing is that sentiment in CX is actually quite different. The ways that humans interact…in a customer service scenario is very different from general sentiment in a novel or in a piece of internet literature or blog post.”
That’s where Zendesk’s trove of CX data comes in: To help train a model the company began building in late 2021 after it acquired Cleverly.
CX of the future: Now that Zendesk has a homegrown LLM, what’s next? Aniano said his team is focused on how to surface data in a way that CX leaders can share with their broader organizations, including insights on topics as granular as individual products (and, utilizing sentiment analysis tools, how people feel about them), geographic regions, or shipping methods.
And, according to Aniano, armed with that data, CX teams can make themselves more valuable than ever.
“The battleground [for companies] is great experiences,” he added. And AI-assisted CX teams are one tool companies can use so they don’t show up to that fight with an inadequate arsenal.