Zendesk teams with OpenAI for new AI-backed CX tools
The CX giant's partnership with OpenAI brings new tools to help CX personnel summarize content, create knowledge bases and macros, and quickly compose ticket responses.
Zendesk formed a partnership with OpenAI in which the CX giant will provide its users with AI-supported tools that aim to ease routine ticket generation tasks for CX and customer service workers.
Introduced on April 13, these new capabilities let users summarize content, compose ticket responses and create new macros, which are groups of ordered steps that a customer service agent takes for daily operations.
The tools will be available to customers in an early access program starting May 10, when the vendor said it will unveil more AI-supported tools at its user conference, Zendesk Relate 2023.
Those capabilities have proven themselves to help the agents be more productive.
Predrag JakovljevicAnalyst, Technology Evaluation Centers
"Those capabilities have proven themselves to help the agents be more productive," said Predrag Jakovljevic, an analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers.
OpenAI brings rush of new AI-backed tools to market
Since research lab and vendor OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in November and showed the world the capabilities of generative AI, many tech vendors have been racing to incorporate generative AI-backed technology into their offerings.
"I'm personally getting a bit fatigued by all the similar public relations announcements by the CRM-CX vendors," Jakovljevic said. "All low-hanging fruit for AI and ChatGPT," he added, referring to the relatively easy task of adapting interactive generative AI technology for CX tasks.
Through its collaboration with OpenAI, Zendesk is aiming to elevate the abilities of its proprietary foundation models by combining them with OpenAI's. In this way, Zendesk will maximize the usefulness of its CX data collected by its own models over the decades, according to the vendor.
Cutting ticket response times for customer service workers
So far, Zendesk has unveiled three new tools powered by OpenAI: ticket content recap, knowledge base and macros creation, and ticket creation for agent replies.
The ticket content recap feature will give users a brief overview of lengthy tickets in order to minimize the time-to-ticket resolution ratio.
The knowledge base and macros creation feature will cooperate with Zendesk's proprietary system for examining misplaced support articles and generating articles quickly, and let users compose new macros.
Finally, the ticket creation for agent replies feature will let customer service agents make a bulk ticket response with a single click and several typed words, according to Zendesk.
These new additions sit atop the Zendesk Suite's existing AI-powered tools such as smart analytics, bots, knowledge monitoring, text in chats and self-service capabilities, the vendor noted.
Mary Reines is a news writer covering customer experience and unified communications for TechTarget Editorial. Before TechTarget, Reines was arts editor at the Marblehead Reporter.
