This guidebook is designed to be your hub of knowledge for everything AI + Zendesk. Whether you’re looking for specific setup guides, or some more information about Zendesk AI features and limitations, we’ve got you covered.
With eesel AI and Zendesk, you get the convenience of ChatGPT with the familiarity of your own helpdesk, team chat, or knowledge base. That means all the benefits of a new technology, without the steep learning curve. Your support agents will never look back and your customers will thank you.
To start, let’s get clear on what the difference is between Zendesk’s AI options and other bot automation.
What is a Zendesk bot and what is Zendesk AI?
Zendesk have implemented their own native AI solutions within the platform. Often, users can confuse Zendesk bots with Zendesk AI – and rightfully so! An AI bot and a regular bot can seem similar at first glance.
Bots are programmed specifically to automate tasks. Each task and how it handles it has to be predetermined. AI bots are able to interpret, decide, and action things that haven’t necessarily been pre-programmed for it to do.
Zendesk sometimes uses bots, chatbots, answer bots, and AI bots almost interchangeably as their AI capabilities are optional features that can be turned on or off for their bot settings. When using one of Zendesk’s bots, it can be either an automated bot without AI, or a bot that has had AI functionality turned on.
Read more about Zendesk AI bots for customer support
- How to setup a Zendesk bot and common issues
- How to optimize your Zendesk bot
- Generative AI and Advanced AI: What’s the difference?
Features & limitations of Zendesk AI
It’s important to know what you’re getting into when you sign up for Zendesk AI. Do you need the Professional plan or the Growth plan? Is Advanced AI necessary or are bots and Generative AI enough for your use case? If you’re feeling unsure, and need a broad overview of Zendesk’s features and limitations, our Features and Limitations blog will help you get clarity.
Intelligent triage with and without Zendesk AI
Support agents sort tickets based on urgency and impact. The three main ways support agents do this are known as manual organization, automatic ticket triage, and intelligent triage.
Automatic ticket triaging is a step up from manually organizing tickets, but the real gem is intelligent triage. AI can read, recognize, and handle ticket triaging beyond what automatic routing can achieve.
Intelligent triage saves your team from having to assign tickets themselves, and reduces Time to Resolution (TTR).
Automatic ticket handling in Zendesk
Every new ticket you receive can lead to a new track of work. For human agents, it takes time to understand a problem, source information, and craft the perfect response. Whereas AI can has intelligence of a human, plus the speed of a bot.
AI can enhance ticket handling in a few ways. It can categorize, merge and summarize tickets for your team. Triaging tickets is one of these the ways it does this. For example, AI can sort your tickets so the most important and the most urgent ones are dealt with first.
AI can also help you analyze tickets to a degree other bots can’t – making sure they’re categorized correctly and quickly. So billing enquiries no longer end up with your returns questions.
Drafting replies with an intelligent AI assistant
Support agents spend most their days responding to inquiries. But we all know that crafting the perfect response that’s practical and easy to understand takes time.
So with eesel AI, you draft replies right in your helpdesk.
Agents simply open a ticket, then use the bot to analyze, interpret, and suggest a response – saving them the countless hours spent rewriting responses and sourcing information.
Zendesk AI pricing
Zendesk isn’t an AI-based platform. Their AI is an upsell for their customers. They promise streamlined service and modern tech.
It means their pricing model can be pretty confusing. It can be hard to know what features you’re getting versus the features you need. It also means that you’re paying for a product that works within one platform.
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be more convenient for you. But it’s important to understand your options.
eesel AI is designed to be flexible according to your company setup. Confluence, Zendesk, Teams or Google Docs, Intercom, and Slack. No matter where you need it, your AI will be consistent with you fully in control and won’t lock you into one platform. That means you don’t pay for multiple AI add-ons across your apps, and if you ever need to change, eesel AI can come with you.
To get a comprehensive look at the costs involved and what your options are, check out our resources about Zendesk pricing.
Zendesk AI bot reporting and analytics
It always helps to see what you’re paying for. That means you need analytics. If it’s not going to plan and you aren’t getting the results you want, you also need to know why?
Zendesk has four main ways of measuring their AI:
- Generative AI agent datasets and a dashboard: Offering you comprehensive insights into the usage of generative AI agent ticket tools. Zendesk AI also comes with a prebuilt dashboard for easy visualization and analysis.
- Intelligent triage predictions and confidence reports: These include intent, language, and sentiment analysis, along with their respective confidence levels.
- Agent engagement analytics: Track how agents are using the AI’s tools and giving you detailed information on usage frequency and patterns across the support team.
- Ticket metrics related to AI tool usage: These metrics allow for comparison between tickets where AI tools were used and those where they weren’t, helping to quantify the impact of AI assistance on key performance indicators.
How do I implement AI in Zendesk?
Implementing AI is easier than you think, and there are many ways you can do it. With eesel AI, you can set up AI to automatically respond to tickets, help your agents with drafting responses, and more.
Check out a few of these handy guides:
- Customizing your AI in Zendesk with eesel
- Connecting ChatGPT to Zendesk using eesel AI
- A practical guide to Zendesk ChatGPT for customer support
- Reports for Zendesk AI with eesel AI
How to connect Zendesk to your knowledge bases and company docs
Zendesk AI is great if you’re looking for an option that’s limited to whatever’s on your Zendesk.
With eesel AI (that’s us!), you can connect data from Zendesk and outside sources too. For example, your entire Confluence wiki, website, internal training documents can all be used as sources that eesel AI can answer from.
More sources to pull from often lead to a more knowledgeable chatbot. Meaning more complete responses and nuanced drafts.
Learn how to connect Zendesk AI and your sources:
AI tools and tips for Zendesk
We’ve put together a handy listicle with a few Zendesk tips.
Want to learn more about AI and Zendesk?
Hopefully we’ve given you everything you need. But just in case you’d like to know more, there’s a few more resources you can draw from. First of all, you can read about Zendesk AI on their website and in their blogs.
If you’re someone who learns by doing, why not sign up to a 7-day free trial for eesel AI today? It’s a great place to start, and extends outside of the Zendesk ecosystem, so you’re not locked in to the one option.
Frequently Asked Questions
That really depends on what you mean by bot. It gets a touch confusing, but bear with us, we’ll take you through it. The first category is mast commonly called a chatbot. Chatbots usually live inside a chat window that pops up when someone visits your website’s help page. They’re typically not supported by AI. So they feed the user questions one at a time, and then that person usually selects their answer from a button. The chat is a bit like following a flow chart, where your decisions determine the next question you’ll be asked. When you reach the end of the flow, you either get an article that solves your problem, or sent to a human support agent. The downside of chatbots is that they need to be across most of the questions you’ll get asked. Otherwise the user will likely have to wait for a human to support them. That can lead to long setups.
The second category of bots is typically referred to as just that ‘a bot’. The difference being that this one uses AI that runs on a Large Language Model (LLM). That means a user can come to a site and type in a question, the bot will understand it and answer them, just like a human would.
To train these bots, you simply feed them your training material. It will then answer any question just like a human would. There’s no decision tree or flow chart to set up. You just give them the material they need, and set up some rules about how they should respond and you’re good to go.
We’ve put together a comprehensive article here that talks you through all the details. In essence, Advanced AI and Generative AI is how Zendesk differentiates its tiers of AI features.
However, at a glance you’ll see that Advanced AI lacks the customer-facing Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities of Generative AI. So while it can help your agents resolve tickets, it won’t ‘converse’ with your customers. It can direct them to articles where they’ll get more support, or triage them through to your agents. This is another spot where eesel AI stands apart from Zendesk. We offer one option, which operates in a similar way to Zendesk’s Generative AI.
Our homepage is a great place to start. If you’re someone who learns by doing, you can also sign up for a free 7-day trial. While AI makes everything sound kind of complicated, setting up eesel is really simple. Once you’re in you’ll find the same. We have a help center full of great info too. You’ll find everything you need there. But if you’re really stumped, feel free to email us. Our email is hi@eesel.app.
Our support team is always happy to answer questions. Email it@eesel.app and we’ll get back to you soon.
