Zendesk integrates AI with intelligent triage to accelerate CX responses

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Customer service is a tough business, with multiple challenges that businesses must address quickly in order to maintain the best possible customer experience.

In an effort to help organizations meet customer service challenges faster, San Francisco-based Zendesk today announced a series of new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features that aim to speed up problem solving and workflow. The new AI capabilities are based on technologies that Zendesk acquired in 2021 through the acquisition of Portuguese startup Cleverly AI. Cleverly technologies now serve as the foundation to enable new incident triage and recommendation features in Zendesk Suite Enterprise Edition.

“At Cleverly, our mission was to make machine learning scalable within the CX [customer experience] industry and we were able to achieve that,” said Cristina Fonseca, formerly CEO of Cleverly AI and currently VP President of Products at Zendesk at VentureBeat.

AI has a strong impact on customer service

In recent years, AI has become an increasingly common aspect of customer service workflows.

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At the most basic level is the near-ubiquitous use of AI-powered chatbots that are meant to help consumers with simple questions and requests. Artificial intelligence also helps call centers, providing automation and guidance to agents.

Several vendors in the broader customer experience and support market have embraced AI-based technologies. Startup Capacity, which raised funding earlier this year, provides technology to help organizations automatically organize information so it's more easily accessible by customer support. In June, contact center leader Genesys bolstered its platform with AI capabilities it also acquired through an acquisition, with the aim of better understanding and improving the customer experience.

> A smart approach to automation at Zendesk

New AI-powered features that Cleverly-based technology enables include a smart triage system.

Fonseca explained that smart triage helps automate repetitive tasks that customer service agents often have to perform. Among the most common tasks is the need to label what a customer request is.

The new AI-powered smart triage system was trained on a large corpus of customer service requests and is able to infer what the customer actually wants. The system will now help officers tag requests so they are properly identified and processed. In the retail industry, which is the first target of the new service, the system can correctly identify order status, billing and refund requests, among other common types of customer inquiries.

Fonseca added that smart triage also provides skills-based routing, where requests are sent to the right person, as well as prioritization capabilities. The other key AI-powered service that Zendesk is now integrated with is called smart assist...