Zendesk says its AI Agents Advanced product can resolve more than 30% of customer interactions almost instantly after three clicks and company knowledge are added.
“we can solve almost instantaneously more than 30% of customers interactions.”
Person
Tom Eggemeyer
1 episodes · 23 quoted claims
Tom Eggemeyer says some Zendesk customers reach 85-90% AI resolution rates while customers with complex use cases reach only 20-30%.
“There are some of our customers that are getting 85 or 90% resolutions, but there's some customers with more complex use cases that are getting 20 or 30%.”
An Australian e-commerce customer of Zendesk had five different internal policies defining what counted as a return, which hurt AI accuracy.
“they had 5 different policies, for instance, on from different parts of the organization on what constituted a return.”
Tom Eggemeyer recalls OpenAI's launch in October 2022 (the ChatGPT release) producing a surge of buzz that shaped his thinking at Zendesk.
“I remember, uh, when OpenAI launched, I think it was October 2022, um, and there was an amazing amount of buzz about it”
In December 2022 Zendesk had about ten AI data scientists and engineers, and Tom Eggemeyer asked them for a roadmap in Lisbon, Portugal.
“I remember this vividly in December 2022 with some of our, uh, lead, um, we had a small group of AI, uh, data scientists and engineers, about 10 of them”
Tom Eggemeyer says he became CEO of Zendesk in December 2022.
“Uh, I just started that month as CEO”
Tom Eggemeyer previously worked at Genesis, which was entirely on-premises software before becoming a leading cloud contact center provider.
“I worked for a company called Genesis that was 100% prem.”
Zendesk says it has about 30,000 knowledge base customers.
“we have about 30,000 knowledge base customers.”
Zendesk launched generative search, which returns a direct answer instead of a list of links, as a free part of its knowledge base product.
“we've launched something called generative search, and this is free part of our product for knowledge bases”
Tom Eggemeyer says Zendesk A-B tests on the top fifty to hundred use cases show AI agents are usually as accurate or more accurate than human agents.
“usually, an AI agent is as accurate or more accurate than a human agent.”
Zendesk's quality assurance product scores every human and AI agent interaction for accuracy, tone and resolution using an algorithm other than a large language model.
“we actually score every single AI agent or human agent interaction for accuracy, for tone, for resolution.”
Tom Eggemeyer says most companies currently analyze only about 1% of customer interactions for quality.
“Right now, most companies are doing, like, 1% of interactions, they're analyzing.”
Tom Eggemeyer expects 10-20% of customer interactions to remain human-led, mainly the most complex ones.
“We still think ten or 20% of interactions are gonna be human-led, and they're gonna be the most complex interactions.”
Zendesk introduced an automated resolutions pricing model under which it is paid only when its AI resolves a customer's problem.
“we've come out with our new pricing model called automated resolutions. We only get paid if we solve a customer's problem with you, if we resolve it.”
Tom Eggemeyer describes customer support software pricing as moving from per-seat to per-interaction and now toward outcome-based pricing.
“In the past, it was seats. We still have some seats. Some companies made the twit- uh, the switch to interactions.”
Tom Eggemeyer says an airline using interaction-based pricing would likely have paid about $2 for an AI interaction that failed to rebook his flight.
“they would've gotten charged $2 for an interaction, even though I was more dissatisfied”
Tom Eggemeyer says average handling time for human agents will rise after automation because AI takes the easier cases.
“your average handling time is gonna go way up, okay?”
Tom Eggemeyer says Zendesk handles 4.6 billion resolutions a year, a data set used to post-train its models.
“we do 4.6 billion resolutions a year.”
Zendesk says it has trained over 10,000 people with limited access to opportunity to become customer service agents.
“We've trained, um, over 10,000, um, people, uh, that might not have the same kind of access”
Zendesk opened an enterprise license for ChatGPT to its employees, and Tom Eggemeyer says he uses it daily.
“we've opened up like an enterprise license for ChatGPT. I use it every day.”
Zendesk predicts that 80% of customer interactions will be fully automated resolutions within five years.
“We believe at Zendesk that 80% of interactions will be through automated resolutions in five years”
Zendesk recently acquired a reporting and analytics company that supports natural-language queries about business data.
“we just, uh, acquired a company that does some really cool stuff in reporting and analytics”
Tom Eggemeyer says some of Zendesk's best customers avoid being named as references so competitors will not learn they resolve 70-80% of interactions with AI.
“some of our best customers don't want their name out and don't want the results out”