Zendesk Launches Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist

Zendesk today introduced Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, two artificial intelligence-powered solutions to help businesses triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale.

With these solutions, companies can understand customer intent and sentiment through account-specific, data-driven models customized for individual use cases.

Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist use proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and apply a vertical lens. This creates models custom to each business capable of identifying the intent, language, and sentiment of each customer interaction. Specific inquiries, such as "I'm having problems with payment", can be automatically sent to an agent equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution, while inquiries that include language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way will indicate a highly negative sentiment and be routed to the top of the queue.

With the new capabilities companies can do the following:

• Instantly route and prioritize revenue drivers;
• Analyze distribution of requests to plan operations, collaborate across departments, and identify improvement opportunities;
• Automatically guide agents on how to best resolve customer issues in real time, understand context, recommend solutions, and improve coaching and training;
• Continuously boost accuracy as the AI receives feedback on predictions and recommendations; and
• Detect sensitive information automatically to meet compliance and security needs or extract confidential data like names, addresses, phone numbers, usernames, and financial info for use in workflows

"With this technology, we're delivering AI tools that can be set up in under a minute to streamline business operations without needing dedicated developers or an expensive implementation," said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer of Zendesk, in a statement. "Our approach is designed to take the burden off customer experience teams through pre-trained machine learning tools that do more, faster, and with less guesswork involved. These models come ready to use instantly and continue to learn over time and become customized to each company's operations by continuously incorporating feedback."

"Instead of putting bots that aren't fully trained in front of customers, causing frustration and many times lost business, Zendesk's fundamentally different approach takes the burden and complexity off of customers, allowing companies to build powerful applications on top of a strong foundation," said Cristina Fonseca, vice president of product at Zendesk, in a statement.