Businesses today are increasingly turning to AI agents to enhance their customer service capabilities. Integrating an AI agent into Zendesk can streamline operations, improve response times, and boost customer satisfaction. Here’s how you can achieve this seamless integration.
As customer expectations and size evolve, businesses must leverage advanced technologies to stay competitive. AI agents have emerged as game-changers in customer support, offering efficiency, 24/7 availability, and consistent service.
Case Study: Zendesk Customer Chat & Email Automation for a Leading FinTech
How to Identify the Right AI Agent Company for Your Zendesk
Selecting the right AI agent company for your Zendesk setup is crucial for enhancing your customer support operations. To make an informed decision, consider the following key factors:
1. Data Ingestion Pipeline: There are two aspects to data-ingestion capabilities.
a. First is that the AI agent must be capable of ingesting data from diverse sources—PDFs, videos, images, text documents, Notion, Slack, etc.—to provide up-to-date and comprehensive responses.
b. Second and most important aspect is data-readiness for model training. An old saying in the analytics space is “Garbage IN Garbage OUT”.
It is very crucial for your AI agent organization to pre-process and standardize the data using a powerful data processing engine to be able to train models to achieve high accuracy.
2. Flexibility in Deployment: Imagine you could create 100 copies of your best support agent and put them at every consumer touchpoint, how easy things would be?! Now you can do that with an AI agent but only if the company you onboard has integration compatibility with various tools like Slack, Intercom, Zendesk, and more. Training an AI agent is a time and resource intensive task, therefore you’d ideally want to focus your efforts on making the best AI agent instead of training different agents across platforms. Be on the lookout for companies with a headless model that can be plugged and played everywhere!
The trained AI agent should ideally be multifaceted to not only handle customer facing conversations but also empower the human agents to quickly gather resources to navigate escalations.
3. No Vendor Lock-In: Imagine Zendesk strikes an exclusive deal with Anthropic, preventing you from using ChatGPT’s latest model for your customer support. You wouldn't want to be caught in such a bind! Shifting to a different platform like Intercom or Salesforce would then require rebuilding your AI model from scratch—a daunting and time intensive task.
Ideally, the company you partner with to create your AI model should ensure its compatibility across multiple models and platforms. So if you have to switch from using GPT-4o on Zendesk to Claude 3.5 on Salesforce, you can do that within 5 mins, rather than spending 6 months. This way, you can migrate seamlessly without losing your crucial trained model. Such flexibility allows you to continuously build on previous learnings, enhancing and refining your customer experience over time, rather than starting from square one. Choose a partner that supports portability and growth, ensuring your AI evolves with your business needs.
4. Accuracy: Air Canada landed themselves in a PR disaster when their customer service chatbot misguided a user. When it comes to customer relations, the last thing you’d want is to use incorrect and non-personal answers to an angry customer. You should be seeking an AI agent that produces both CSATs and accuracy at par or better than your best human agents. To understand whether your AI agent would be able to match the accuracy - you should ask for additional performance figures such as %improvement in CSATs, %first connect resolution, %resolution rate.
5. Handling Complex Queries at High Volume: Imagine asking four questions and only getting one answer to the last questions. Frustrating, right? You definitely don't want your customers to experience that with your AI agent. With global operations, businesses receive queries around the clock in multiple languages and in various formats—some short and concise, others long and detailed. Here's how to ensure your AI agent handles all these efficiently:
- Multilingual Proficiency: Your AI agent should be proficient in multiple languages. It needs to identify the customer's language and respond accordingly, providing a localized experience without requiring multiple human agents. This reduces frustration and enhances customer satisfaction.
- Handling Long Form Questions: For long form questions, it's a best practice to break questions down into smaller sub-queries. This ensures the AI model addresses each part independently, providing comprehensive and satisfactory answers to your customers.
Ask these right questions to the AI agent company to be more aware if the AI agent fits your needs
6. Seamless Human Routing: We all understand that AI can't answer 100% of queries, it's crucial for an AI system to establish a confidence score to be able to provide a seamless experience for users a 100% of time. This score helps the AI determine when it can provide an accurate, informative, and appropriate response. If the confidence score falls below a certain threshold, rather than offering a potentially incorrect answer, the AI should make a calculated decision to transfer the query to a human agent who can better handle the customer’s needs.
7. Data Security: The last thing you want is to make headlines for a data breach. Providing accurate resolutions often requires users to share personal details such as emails, phone numbers, and insurance IDs. Therefore, it's crucial that the company behind your AI agent has robust cybersecurity certifications to ensure secure information flows.
Look for compliance with industry standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001. These certifications provide peace of mind, knowing that your customers' data is handled with the highest security protocols in place. Ensuring these measures not only protects your customers but also upholds your company's reputation and trustworthiness.
When selecting an AI agent company for your Zendesk, consider factors like flexibility in deployment, data ingestion capabilities, accuracy, complex query handling, seamless human routing, no vendor lock-in, multilingual support, and data security. Fini AI stands out with its advanced features and commitment to maintaining the human touch in customer interactions.
Let’s compare some existing vendors in the space:
It might seem daunting looking at so many parameters to look at but luckily many companies are out there helping you in the task and supercharging your support.
Best Practices for Effective AI agent Use
Once deployed, an AI agent still requires continuous improvement to deliver outstanding results. Based on Fini’s experience we also wish to share some essential steps for maintaining your AI agent and a case study showcasing a leading FinTech’s success in improving their bot’s accuracy from 50% to 95%+:
1. Continuous Monitoring: Implement mechanisms to collect and act on feedback regarding the AI agent’s performance. Fini provides a dedicated platform (read more about our open source project Paramount) to help clients' expert agents measure and pinpoint accuracy issues with AI chat. This tool speeds up the discovery of these issues by 10x. for clients to monitor usage tracking, resolution rate, agent transfer rate, and content coverage across chat categories.
2. Continuous Improvement: Iteration is the name of the game. You need to periodically update and train your AI agent with latest data and new types of queries to be able to sustain/ improve performance. Fini AI provides a dedicated AI engineer to help improve the bot faster with the latest LLM updates and market best practices.
3. Human Oversight: Ensure human agents are available to take over complex queries that the AI agent cannot resolve. Human agents should also be actively engaged in sampling QA. Fini empowers agents by providing access to a robust QA platform that helps them assess performance across different categories and provide targeted feedback.
Conclusion
Integrating an AI agent into your Zendesk support can revolutionize your customer service operations. By enhancing efficiency, providing round-the-clock support, and delivering consistent service, AI agents can help you meet and exceed customer expectations. To catch-up with your competition, start your integration journey today and experience the transformative power of AI-driven customer support.
Explore how Fini can revolutionize your customer service by visiting www.usefini.com.
Additional Resources
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- GenAI agent Use Cases in Support: Read our guide
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