Customer support professionals are increasingly turning to AI, with one survey by HubSpot revealing that 84% of respondents say AI will be instrumental in helping them meet customer service expectations.
A leader in this space is Zendesk, a company that has launched a suite of Zendesk generative AI products for a range of use cases. These include summaries, searches, and bots.
The use of generative AI in Zendesk has intriguing possibilities for teams that want to increase agents' efficiency and productivity.
Some of the features are available on the standard plans, while others require purchasing add-ons per agent to implement.
In addition to using Zendesk’s native generative AI capabilities, you can also benefit from integrating third-party apps such as Swifteq, which allow you to automate a number of functions within Zendesk.
Swifteq is a Zendesk app developer that helps customer support teams automate simple workflows and improve customer self-service.
Adopting Zendesk AI while using Zendesk can enable you to make significant improvements in response times and customer satisfaction.
We're going to dive deep into the features and use cases of generative AI in Zendesk so you are more fully equipped to see how it can help your customer support team.
What Is Zendesk Generative AI?
First, let’s be clear about what Zendesk generative AI actually is.
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can create new content, rather than just analyzing or categorizing existing data.
These are language models that are designed to “generate” outputs that weren't explicitly programmed but instead learned from patterns in their training data.
In the context of Zendesk, generative AI is used to enhance customer service by automating common tasks and generating content, often making it quicker to respond to customers and sometimes eliminating the need for agent intervention entirely.
60% of customers say they have higher standards for customer service now than ever before, and Zendesk AI helps you achieve more ambitious goals by freeing your agents for more meaningful work.
Zendesk Generative AI Features
Zendesk offers a number of generative AI features, some of which come with the standard plan, while others require the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on or the early access program to take advantage of.
Each feature is designed to address specific pain points in the customer support workflow.
Auto assist
With the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on, you can use auto assist as an AI-powered assistant to help you solve customer interactions more quickly.
Auto assist analyzes the contents of inbound customer tickets and makes suggestions on how to reply.
Auto assist appears in the composer section when you're working on tickets in Agent Workspace, and can also execute various actions. Whether auto assist is suggesting an answer or an action, the agent must always accept the prompt before it goes any further.
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Custom intents (EAP)
In the early access program (EAP) and for Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on users, custom intents automatically classify incoming tickets by intent, language, and customer sentiment for intelligent triage.
This makes it much easier to categorize tickets as they land in your inbox and see what kind of inquiries are most prevalent. You can create custom intents immediately that are specific to your business needs to improve accuracy and confidence.
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Ticket summaries
With the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on, you can use generative AI to summarize all the public comments that have been made on a ticket.
This means that agents viewing the ticket for the first time, or coming back to the ticket, can easily view the summary to get up to speed and respond to customers more quickly.
It’s possible to hide or refresh the ticket summary when using Agent Workspace.
Article summaries (EAP)
In the early access program, you can use Zendesk AI to generate article summaries for your help center content, which will appear in a shaded box at the top of the article.
You can repeatedly generate the summary until you’re happy with the result. This feature lets customers quickly preview an article and helps them decide whether it’s for them without having to read the entire text.
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Expand ticket comments
Using the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on, you can use the enhanced writing feature, part of Agent Copilot, to expand comments sent to a customer.
This means AI will take your rough draft and transform it into a final comment so that agents spend less time writing to customers. Enter the main ideas you want to include in the message and then expand to create a coherent answer.
Generative search for help center (EAP)
In the early access program, your customers searching for answers in your help center can view an AI-generated result without having to click through various articles.
This Zendesk generative search feature provides a quick summary that gives an overview of the search results, while customers can click through for more information if needed.
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Generative replies
Your Zendesk AI agents can use generative replies on Zendesk for customers based on your existing help center content.
AI constructs replies using the information available and offers them to your customers when they are conversing with the bot, while also linking to the source article.
This improves the customer experience by removing the need for customers to abandon the conversation in order to visit a help article.
Call summaries and transcriptions
With the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on, Zendesk generative AI for voice will produce call summaries on tickets at the end of each call.
Agents no longer have to take the time to manually write call notes, and they can swiftly move on to the next customer. Call recording files are transcribed from speech to text as soon as they are added to tickets, with a summary created when the call ends.
Your data is not used to train Large Language Models by OpenAI, which provides the service for Zendesk.
Bot personas
Bot personas, or AI agent personas, give a personality to your bot when they are interacting with your customers.
This personality is a consistent voice that can reflect your brand, giving a more human face to your AI conversations. You can select and apply a persona from Zendesk’s library, including professional, friendly, and playful.
Use Cases for Generative AI in Zendesk
Here’s how you can use Zendesk generative AI products.
Implementing them can be done incrementally, so your team has a chance to adapt to each new workflow gradually.
When you have Swifteq integrated with Zendesk, you can use the translate function to translate any of your existing help center articles that have been enabled in Guide.
With the support of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you can bulk translate to translate one or more articles in your help center.
Generative AI translates your help center articles into the language of your choice. Save the articles in Draft or Under Review to give your team a chance to check your articles before they are published.
You also have the option to partly translate an article from the Article View. Set up a Glossary for your translations to maintain control of the translations for specific terms and phrases. This helps establish a clearer brand voice when translating.
It may be that customers submit tickets to your help desk in multiple languages. Using Swifteq’s integration with Zendesk, you can automatically translate incoming tickets from any language into your native language.
Using Translate Conversations, turn Auto Translate to ON in the agent’s settings and incoming tickets will be translated into your preferred language. It will be displayed as a comment when your ticket arrives in the inbox.
You can also use Swifteq to translate a reply to a ticket when you send it as a Public Reply. Use the Translate Conversations function to translate your reply into the customer’s language. You can add the original text to the conversation as an internal note.
Manual data extraction in Zendesk is time-confusing for agents, but an AI solution is available to automate this task for you.
For example, you may want to extract order numbers, customer names, or product names for every ticket, which can be accomplished with simple parsing rules.
Use Swifteq’s Zendesk parser app to extract data from Zendesk ticket comments and automatically populate fields in support tickets. Create and modify your own parsing rules, depending on the needs of your business.
When you autofill ticket fields in Zendesk, you save valuable time and minimize the likelihood of errors using generative AI to accomplish this task.
Expand and improve content
With Advanced AI Add-on, you can write rough drafts of your help center content in Zendesk and then use generative AI to improve it.
Write a few bullet points and then use generative AI to expand the content into a full article. This means you don’t need to spend as much effort writing when a few notes will suffice, and these can be fed into the AI.
Alternatively, use Zendesk AI to simplify a lengthy article and make it more concise, and therefore easier to understand for your readers. Adjust the tone of selected content to make it more formal or more friendly, depending on the brand voice of your organization.
You can generate up to five suggestions for amending your text without losing the original version.
Create macro suggestions for admins
In the Zendesk Advanced AI Add-on, it’s possible to get suggestions that automate everyday tasks using macros.
If you’re not sure which actions are constantly being repeated by human agents, then macros suggestions for admins are a great resource.
If you have received at least 150 tickets in the last three months, then you can turn on suggested macros to see a list of up to ten suggested macros in the Admin Center. You can then select or dismiss each macro depending on its relevance.
In the default setting, only admins can see macro suggestions in the Admin Center. The suggestions are based on at least two different comments by two different agents.
Leveling Up Your Zendesk Instance
If you’re not already using generative AI in customer support, now is a great time to start. It’s the perfect complement to your existing customer support team.
Swifteq offers a range of generative AI apps that integrate with Zendesk and enhance its native capabilities since Zendesk already uses generative AI to gain efficiencies and improve the productivity of your agents.
In addition to stellar human support, automations allow your agents to accomplish more and avoid some of the most repetitive tasks associated with customer support.
Ideally, your business should invest in Zendesk’s Advanced AI Add-on package to take advantage of the best generative AI features.
When you implement generative AI in your customer support operations, you reap a return on investment and start using Zendesk to its full capacity. You improve agent morale, earn happier customers, and waste less time on essential but less productive and meaningful tasks.
Written by Catherine Heath
Catherine Heath is a content writer and community builder for creative and ethical companies. She’s a blogging sensei — you’ll often find her writing case studies, help documentation, and articles about customer support. Her writing has helped businesses to attract curious audiences and transform them into loyal advocates.