Zendesk, a specialist in customer support, sales, and other customer communications solutions, sees AI as a major proponent in creating immersive CX for customers, as well as unlocking greater potential for the entire customer engagement organization. No doubt with 71% of customers spending more with companies that offer fluid, personalized, and seamless customer experiences, businesses must move quickly to do more with less.

Unlocking AI for service organizations

We spoke to Tom Blackman, Head of Global Accounts, Asia Pacific and Japan, Zendesk on the opportunities he sees for his customers with Zendesk AI, and how CX and support have to take centerstage for businesses to succeed. Last year, along with a CX trends report, Zendesk launched their iteration of gen-AI powered solution to support smarter conversations and productivity for service organizations. With Zendesk AI, customers, particularly CX agents and admins, can use insights and actions instantaneously to improve customer interactions and, hopefully enhance overall customers’ relationship with the brands along the way.

We are seeing very positive responses from the businesses we work with.

According to Tom, Zendesk’s customers found improved cost savings and enhanced productivity with reduction of thousands of hours spent each month on time-consuming, manual tasks, amidst macroeconomic pressures and budgetary challenges.

These advantages came at no surprise to Zendesk, as the company had integrated AI as part of their solutions, long before the recent popularity surge thanks to gen AI. “AI, machine learning (ML) and automations aren’t new concepts in CX,” added Tom.

Echoing customer sentiments, brands are also demanding more from solution providers such as Zendesk. But introducing a new solution comes with challenges, lack of internal awareness, mis-alignment with existing tech stacks, clunky, unintuitive interfaces, often hindering quick adoption of new innovation.

Simple Out-of-Box Innovation

Zendesk’s approach to AI is simple – they want to make it possible for businesses of any size to get started with AI right out of the box. Designed to be fuss-free, Zendesk AI promises implementation within minutes without the need for developers, heavy IT spend or long lead times for access and use.

From their acquisition of Cleverly back in 2021, to their partnership with OpenAI, the company works on the ideal of keeping it simple for businesses, while leveraging on the power of generative AI. Besides its own proprietary models trained specifically for CX, pre-trained advanced bots can be deployed by agents and admins, providing practical solutions to everyday problems.

“It (the bots) leverages trillions of data points from real service interactions to give more personalized, industry-specific and accurate responses, and will only get smarter and more intuitive over time, allowing our customers’ businesses to continuously improve.”

In their goal to support frontline efficiency, Zendesk takes it back to basic by engineering customer needs into automated workflows. For example, using gen AI to parse through relevant customer data to find the right information when addressing a customer’s unique intent and sentiments. By coupling sentiments and intent with ability to dynamically find the right data points to create data-driven automation suggestions and custom content cues, customer service agents pivot from being content creators to overseers of CX. Freeing the agents’ time then allows more room for them to bring their full attention and empathy to every customer interaction.

Trust is the cornerstone of great CX

As the demand for AI-driven and personalized experiences grows, it is critical to ensure data across the customer journey is safe and secure. To successfully safeguard customer data, organizations need to have a robust approach to data privacy that lays a solid foundation which is further secured with powerful data protection tools.

“Trust is the cornerstone of delivering a great CX. It forms the foundation upon which strong and enduring relationships are built between businesses and their customers,” said Tom.

According to Gartner, 81% of customers refuse to do business with a brand they don’t trust and 89% expect to disengage from a brand that breaches their trust. Having the right foundation built in place for customer privacy protection means that organizations must mandate infrastructural security measures and best practices such as employing enhanced password security. Coupled with enhanced accessibility guardrails, CX agents will also need to consistently be on top of modern social engineering techniques as well as maintain strong cadence of security and privacy training to stay on top of the ever-changing data privacy and security landscape. From an organizational standpoint, it is essential to build a culture of responsible data use and data protection through both the cybersecurity infrastructure and CX agents who manage customer data at every juncture.

In tandem with organizational efforts, deploying the right CX tools is essential to ensure data privacy. The advent of AI tools has saturated the current CX market but Zendesk believes that the pursuit for enhanced performance should not come at the cost of inadequate data protection. Zendesk launched its latest Advanced Data Privacy & Protection package alongside Zendesk AI to give businesses a peace of mind while delivering the seamless CX their customers want. With targeted encryption, elevated privacy as well as strengthened security and accessibility log, businesses have greater and more flexible control over their customer data, thereby allowing them to better safeguard their businesses.

The concerted efforts from both organizational effort and technological support will help ensure secure customer data management, which ultimately builds customer trust in the longer run.