Answer Bot expands to new channels for always-on support
The next evolution of Guide Enterprise enables businesses to manage
and create better self-service experiences
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Zendesk,
Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced the expansion of Answer Bot across
all web and mobile channels, allowing companies to provide always-on
support and faster responses for consumers with AI-powered self-service.
Supporting the growing demand for customer-centric solutions, Zendesk
also announced new capabilities for its Guide Enterprise knowledge
management product that helps customer experience teams leverage
automation and AI to develop, maintain, and manage more complex
knowledge needs across multiple brands, products, and services.
With Answer Bot and Guide Enterprise, companies can use AI and
automation to power experiences that put customers at the center of the
business.
Powerful automation with Answer Bot
This extension of Zendesk’s popular Answer Bot product enables real-time
support, helping customers quickly access answers to common questions
regardless of the channel they are reaching out on. Businesses can
implement Answer Bot via API, Web Widget and Mobile SDKs, as well as
email and web forms. As a result, companies will be able to reduce the
volume of repetitive tickets, freeing up agent time to focus on more
complex customer requests.
“Customers today demand fast responses in a context that suits them, and
AI can be used to help companies be more timely and accurate when
engaging with customers,” said Adrian McDermott, president of products,
Zendesk. “With Answer Bot, we’re putting an end to laborious processes
to resolve simple questions. We’re not just delivering self-service
everywhere – we’re delivering AI-powered self-service everywhere, which
will continue to make for a better customer experience.”
Research from the Zendesk Benchmark report of 45,000 companies worldwide
shows 85 percent of customers will shift to a different contact method
if they don’t get a response from their initial request, with 44 percent
waiting less than an hour before doing so.
“Answer Bot in the Web Widget has allowed our customers to self-serve
their easy, quick-answer questions, allowing our agents to have
bandwidth to serve more complex issues,” said Aja Varney, director,
global customer engagement at Spartan Race. “The time savings for our
agents has allowed us to add an additional three hours of chat coverage
per day.”
Answer Bot also improves internal team productivity by surfacing
recommendations as they speak to customers, contributing to a more
efficient and accurate experience. Answer Bot for Slack and Answer Bot
for Agents uses machine learning to automate support for internal teams
to find answers as quickly as possible on behalf of their customers.
New Guide Enterprise powers smarter self-service
Nearly four billion knowledge base articles were viewed on Zendesk in
2018—up 13 times from five years ago. According to the Harvard
Business Review, 81 percent of customers prefer to find answers
themselves, which means companies should provide access to self-service
options and regularly update help resources.
Newly added Guide
Enterprise tools address this demand by empowering teams to maintain
and manage more complex knowledge needs. Additional features, including
content lifecycle automation and enterprise-level customer self-service
enhancements, are detailed below:
-
Content Cues provide signals to content managers to maintain
and improve their knowledge base. AI-powered cues help prioritize
content based on support inquiry trends, allowing managers to optimize
their knowledge base to better match customer questions. For example,
they can be prompted to update the most viewed articles as a priority
to make sure the most common queries are always addressed. -
Article Events help companies better manage content throughout
its lifecycle. Content managers can now use Article Verification to
set automatic intervals to verify the relevance and accuracy of their
articles, while prompting agents to create content on an ongoing
basis. Scheduled Publishing* makes it easier for content managers to
create and automatically manage content that has a limited life span,
such as a short-term sale or promotion article. -
Flexible Hierarchies, multiple theme templates and
search enhancements make it easy for companies to manage more
complex knowledge needs internally, externally and across multiple
brands or services. These new enhancements to the Guide Enterprise
experience make it more user-friendly for advanced businesses to give
customers the accurate self-service experiences they expect and are
familiar with.
Zendesk unveiled these new solutions today at Showcase
London, the company’s event that brings industry leaders together to
have great conversations, the freshest Zendesk product updates, and
stories from innovative brands who make the most of Zendesk.
Answer Bot for Web Widget and Answer Bot for Slack are now generally
available for customers. Answer Bot API, scheduled publishing and Mobile
SDKs are currently in early access and will be generally available soon.
More details for Answer Bot are available here.
*Source: Zendesk
Benchmark Report. Refers to customer results after one year with the
service.
About Zendesk:
The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Our customer
service and engagement products are powerful and flexible, and scale to
meet the needs of any business. Zendesk serves businesses across
hundreds of industries, with more than 145,000 paid customer accounts
offering service and support in over 30 languages. Zendesk is
headquartered in San Francisco, and operates worldwide with 17 offices
in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Learn more
at www.zendesk.com.
Contacts
Analisa Schelle, Zendesk
[email protected]
510-292-5410
