How Zendesk builds the future of AI-powered service
Thomas Wieberneit
Management Consultant, Technology Analyst, Podcast Host, Startup Advisor
On April 15 to April 18, 2024, Zendesk held its annual Relate event, including a half day analyst track on April 15. The event was attended by around 1,600 customers, partners and analysts.
It was about Zendesk’s strategy, which revolves around - no surprise here - AI to deliver better customer experiences. As part of this strategy, Zendesk also made clear how the past twelve month’s acquisitions of Klaus, Ultimate, and tymeshift get integrated into Zendesk’s customer service offerings, enriching and rounding them off. The company is betting big on AI, working on the assumption that interaction volumes between customers and companies are continuing to increase very fast. As a conclusion of this, service needs to become AI driven to accommodate this scale. Secondly, Zendesk sees AI as the technology underlying the necessary high degree of personalization. Together, this is estimated to increase the market size available to CX solutions that automate CX labor tremendously.
At the event, Zendesk had three key announcements. They were
Behind all this lies the recognition that customer service is very much conversational.
Customers and partners that I talked with had a keen interest in learning more about AI use cases. Many of them had started to use AI but estimated themselves still in early stages.?
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The bigger picture
The customer service software market has become very crowded with players ranging from service specialists to suite players, with classic call-center companies making inroads, too. Additionally, there is a raft of niche companies that are offering specialized add-ons to improve customer service solutions, from connecting them to workforce management or -engagement solutions, to QA solutions and many more. It is quite easy to see a kind of a consolidation going on here.
Thank you for joining us, Thomas! ??