Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Zendesk is a powerful customer support software that helps you build lasting relationships with your customers, thanks to its help desk support, real-time messaging features, and omnichannel functionality. While Zendesk equips your human support team, your staff may not always be available to help. This is where Zendesk AI chatbots step in.
In this post, you’ll learn more about Zendesk AI chatbots, why they’re worth adding to your workflow, and the best options currently available on the market.
What is a Zendesk AI Chatbot?
Chatbots are programs that can simulate conversations with your customers through a messenger interface. With artificial intelligence, they become much more human-like. In other words, these AI chatbots can converse with your customers as if they’re part of your human team.
Zendesk AI chatbots use two core pieces of technology to achieve this:
- Large language models: These are models trained on massive amounts of text data, allowing them to understand and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions.
- Machine learning: As the chatbot interacts with humans, it can improve its responses over time. Think of it as “learning” more about human conversations by studying chat records.
Most AI chatbots start with pre-programmed responses drawn from knowledge bases and frequently asked questions (FAQs) pages. The ultimate goal is to allow customers more control over their issues, promote self-service, and improve resolution rates.
Zendesk offers its own AI chatbots, such as the Answer Bot, with its subscription plans. You can also find a treasure trove of powerful AI chatbot integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace.
Benefits of Using Zendesk AI Chatbots
At its core, Zendesk is a ticketing platform that offers additional customer support features. Here’s why integrating AI chatbot features into Zendesk will improve your support workflows and maximize the platform's potential.
Improved response times
AI chatbots can produce quick responses to customer questions based on the data you train them on. For topics that don't require human decision-making, they can deflect common questions by drawing answers from your support documents. This way, customers don’t need to wait for your human agents to get back to them, significantly reducing response times.
24/7 availability
Providing round-the-clock customer support is taxing for your human staff and can be a waste of resources. AI chatbots run continuously as long as your servers are connected, which means they can provide active support to your customers any time of day—regardless of the time zone. This also frees up your human agents to focus on more complex issues during business hours.
Omnichannel support
Omnichannel support is becoming a standard for AI chatbots. It helps your customers get assistance on their preferred channel, be it your website chat, email, or social media platform. This not only makes customer support easier and more consistent but also provides context to the customer’s problems.
Better customer engagement
Most AI chatbots are designed to capture important customer information, which you can use as key lead data. They can also proactively provide relevant information to your customers, such as product releases and service updates.
Comparing Zendesk AI Chatbot with Other Solutions
Zendesk has its native AI chatbots that you can deploy not only for your customers but also for your support team. Here’s a detailed look at these chatbots and other solutions you can find on the Zendesk Marketplace.
Zendesk Answer Bot and AI Agents
Zendesk offers two AI-powered chatbot solutions, including its AI agents and the Answer Bot. Here’s a quick breakdown of the two:
- Answer Bot: This bot integrates with your Zendesk Guide knowledge base to automatically suggest relevant articles to customers while they wait for a live agent. You can further configure it with customized answers by enabling Zendesk Messaging.
- AI Agents: This is a new feature that Zendesk offers on a trial basis as of writing. In addition to providing the features of the Answer Bot, AI Agents can handle more complex interactions such as product returns, transactions, and refunds.
These AI-powered chatbots are available on Zendesk’s Suite and Support plans. You can also leverage a more advanced AI model by getting the Advanced AI add-on.
My AskAI
If you’re looking for an affordable AI chatbot that can deflect the bulk of your conversations in Zendesk Messaging, My AskAI might be the right choice. To set it up, simply create a no-code custom chatbot for your business within My AskAI and add it to your Zendesk Messaging web widgets. Here’s why it works:
- It can deflect more than 75% of your support requests, freeing up your human agents for higher-stake tasks.
- You pay less than $0.1 per conversation.
- You can train your chatbots not only on your Zendesk data but also on other support documents stored on your websites, cloud storage, and other sources.
- It can help you generate actionable insights by drawing data from your conversations.
Note that every web widget you add to your Zendesk Messaging system will require a separate Sunshine Conversations subscription. This also applies to My AskAI.
DeepConverse
DeepConverse is another great AI chatbot integration that you can add to your Zendesk Support system. It offers responses supported by ChatGPT, provides interactive guides, and facilitates ticket automation.
Here are a few more details why it might be worth adding to your workflow:
- Guided troubleshooting: With DeepConverse, you can provide interactive and guided troubleshooting steps for your customers in addition to offering quick responses drawn from your Zendesk knowledge base.
- Efficient ticket handling: DeepConverse can augment your tickets by offering AI-powered suggestions to your agents. At human handover, it can also provide proper context for ticket creation.
Similar to My AskAI, DeepConverse also requires a subscription to Sunshine Conversations.
Conclusion
Zendesk AI chatbots can help streamline your customer support workflows, especially when it comes to deflecting most customer queries that require little human action. While Zendesk offers its own chatbot solutions, they might not necessarily fit your budget and business needs.
If you're a small business or looking for a cost-effective solution, My AskAI is a great choice.
Explore its features today and see if it fits your needs.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
