AI can be the game changer for delivering exceptional CX: Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP India & SAARC, Zendesk
In this exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP India and SAARC, Zendesk, talks about all things AI. He sheds light on the evolving landscape of CX, how AI will play a huge role in providing personalized experiences, and how it can help Indian businesses grow especially given the economic uncertainties. The interaction also features details about Zendesk AI and the brand’s collaboration with OpenAI.
- Can you give us a brief about Zendesk AI and its capabilities?
Customer experience is at a tipping point — AI has the potential to transform how businesses engage with customers. At the same time, it’s getting harder for businesses to give customers their best. They’re being asked to increase productivity while keeping costs down and managing through hiring shortages, higher request volumes, and ongoing economic uncertainty. And the kind of AI they need has been out of reach because many AI solutions in the market are slow and expensive, requiring heavy IT spend, lengthy implementation processes, and highly specialized resources, just to get started. Others are incomplete, designed for a narrow set of service use cases, and are built on bold claims that fall apart once businesses actually try to use them.
That’s why Zendesk is building a different kind of AI to help. Built on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset, Zendesk AI is AI for customer service that allows businesses to tap into powerful intelligence in minutes, not months, and put it to work at every stage of a company’s CX operations. Agents can automatically get customers the right answer based on how they’re feeling and what they want out of the interaction, without a human ever getting involved. Our intelligence lives at the agents’ fingertips, working alongside our easy-to-use tools to put every agent on the fastest path to resolution. AI-powered insights and suggestions can improve agent productivity by using AI-generated content to respond faster, with the correct context. And by continuously learning the company’s CX organization, it allows them to keep getting better at serving their customers.
- Zendesk recently announced its OpenAI integration to add the capabilities of generative AI to improve customer experience. How does Zendesk AI add to these capabilities?
Zendesk AI is an intelligence layer that is built on our proprietary models and Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically trained against decades of Zendesk customer experience data and industry-specific insights. The combination of these models, OpenAI and Zendesk industry leading solutions enables businesses to leverage the power of generative AI to more efficiently and effectively serve customers.
Building on the partnership with OpenAI, we’ve been able to introduce new features that continue to tap into the power of generative AI, such as content summarization, response rephrasing and tone shift. These help agents create clearer and more thoughtful responses to customers, saving significant time and effort for agents.
- How can this new solution help businesses in India grow?
Businesses today are being challenged to do more with less and that’s exactly where Zendesk AI can help businesses in India. The intelligence is layered throughout the entire customer journey, as well as the agent and admin experience, thus enabling businesses to increase efficiency by leveraging the power of intelligent CX and generative AI.
The biggest opportunity lies in using AI to eliminate much of the manual workload that can be low value and time consuming, thereby improving agent and admin productivity. For example, incoming messages and emails can be automatically analyzed with LLMs trained against large CX-specific datasets to better understand customer intent and sentiment across 19 languages. This helps agents to accurately and efficiently anticipate and resolve customer issues faster in real time.
Agents can then spend more time doing more meaningful work, thus feeling more fulfilled. Happier employees make for happy customers. All of this ultimately translates to a better utilization of resources, stronger customer relationships and increased revenue opportunities, which will drive long term profitable growth.
- How is Zendesk AI different from existing technologies in the market?
Zendesk AI is the only solution built upon the largest CX-specific dataset. It derives from billions of tickets and trillions of data points that inform bots and generative AI, enabling businesses to transform the customer experience by delivering personalized, empathetic, and seamless experiences — a perfect blend of IQ and EQ.
Unlike other solutions on the market, Zendesk AI can be set up instantly to immediately add value, without a team of data scientists or developers. The sheer size of the intelligence also means that Zendesk AI will help companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create frictionless interactions.
- At a time when businesses are slashing budgets due to the macroeconomic climate, why do companies need to invest in AI-powered solutions?
Today’s reality is that customers have increasingly high expectations for AI. According to the Zendesk 2023 CX Trends report, 84% of customers in India wish bots were able to provide the same level of service as human agents, but over two-thirds (69%) say they have been repeatedly dissatisfied with bots. It comes as no surprise given 85% of Indian business leaders say their organization’s approach to AI and automation has been ad hoc, and two-thirds (67%) of Indian businesses spend less than 10% of their IT budget on AI.
Imagine a world where customers get fast, accurate answers 24/7 on any channel, with the right tone, context, and incentives to keep them coming back. Agents are freed up to focus on more meaningful work, so they have higher job satisfaction and stick around longer. And AI works automatically behind the scenes to improve operations at every turn: uncovering new automated workflows, summarizing lengthy customer conversations, and recommending the right next steps. All customer interactions can be managed at scale centrally, in one highly flexible system, and can be optimized quickly in response to ever-shifting customer feedback, trends, and insights.
AI can be a gamechanger when it comes to delivering exceptional CX, and when we think about what’s at stake – 80% of customers in India will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience, but the same number will spend more if provided a seamless experience between all points of contact – businesses need to take a serious look at how best to implement AI strategically within their company to make it work for their employees and customers.
