7 key Zendesk AI capabilities for smarter support

Modern customer support feels like a constant race. Ticket volumes just keep going up, and customers want help faster and more personally than ever before. Keeping up isn’t just about hiring more people; it’s really about finding ways to work smarter. That’s where AI comes in. It’s definitely not just a buzzword anymore, especially if you’re using platforms like Zendesk.

Zendesk’s AI capabilities are built to help support teams get more done, cut down on how long customers wait for a reply, and make the whole customer experience smoother. By taking over those repetitive tasks and giving agents smart help, AI frees up your team so they can focus on trickier issues and build better relationships with customers.

Let’s jump into the main AI capabilities Zendesk offers and see how they could really make a difference in how your support team works.

Understanding Zendesk AI’s offerings

Zendesk actually builds artificial intelligence right into its platform with various features. You’ll find these capabilities spread across different plans. While some basic AI features are part of the standard Suite plans, the more advanced stuff often needs the Advanced AI add-on. Knowing what’s included where is pretty important if you want to get the most out of Zendesk AI for your business.

Zendesk definitely gives you a good starting point, but it’s worth knowing that platforms like eesel AI offer other ways to handle these kinds of capabilities. They often give you more flexibility and clearer, more predictable pricing.

7 key Zendesk AI capabilities

To really get the most out of your Zendesk platform, you need to understand its core AI features and how to use them. These capabilities do everything from automating those first customer chats to giving your agents helpful suggestions, all with the goal of making the support process run more smoothly.

Here are seven key AI capabilities you’ll find within the Zendesk world.

1. Autoreplies and generative responses

One of the quickest ways Zendesk AI lends a hand is by automating those first few messages customers send. Autoreplies can greet customers right away and suggest helpful articles from your help center based on what they’re asking about. This can help customers find their answers instantly without needing a human agent to jump in. It’s super useful for common questions like “How do I reset my password?” or “What’s your return policy?”.

Generative responses take this a step further. Instead of just pointing to an article, the AI uses your help center content to actually draft more detailed answers. It can pull information together and give a direct answer right there in the chat. This speeds up how quickly simple issues get solved and means your agents don’t have to spend time manually searching for and sharing information.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It helps handle common tickets automatically.
  • It gives customers instant support.
  • It cuts down on the repetitive questions your agents have to deal with.
• Consideration:
  • Zendesk’s generative AI is helpful, but it mainly learns from your help center content.
  • If you have important knowledge scattered somewhere else, like in past tickets or internal documents, the AI might not be able to use it.
  • eesel AI can train on a much wider range of sources, including past tickets and internal docs. This can lead to automated responses that are more accurate and relevant to the specific question the customer is asking.

2. Intelligent triage

Intelligent triage uses machine learning to look at incoming tickets and automatically sort, tag, and decide how important they are. The AI can figure out what the customer is trying to do (like “check order status” or “ask about a bill”), sense how they’re feeling (are they happy, annoyed, or just neutral), and identify the language they’re using.

This capability really helps make sure tickets get sent to the right department or the agent with the right skills much faster than if someone had to sort them by hand. It means tickets don’t just sit around in a general queue for too long, and agents can start working on issues with better background information right away.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It makes ticket routing much smoother.
  • It helps agents work more efficiently.
  • It ensures urgent problems get attention quickly.
• Consideration:
  • Intelligent triage is often part of Zendesk’s premium Advanced AI add-on, which adds to your costs.
  • eesel AI offers intelligent triage features that you can really customize. You can set up specific rules for routing, tagging, and prioritizing based on complex conditions drawn from the ticket content and customer data, often without the extra per-agent cost that comes with add-ons.

3. Suggested macros and intents

Zendesk AI can look at your past ticket data and see what steps agents took to solve them. Based on this, it can suggest relevant macros (which are basically pre-written responses or actions) that agents can use to quickly handle common issues. This helps agents respond faster and keeps your communication consistent across the team.

Besides suggesting macros, the AI also helps spot and suggest intents within tickets. This intent detection makes intelligent triage more accurate and can even be used to automatically kick off specific workflows or show targeted information to the agent or the customer.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It helps agents get more done.
  • It ensures consistent responses.
  • It can even help you improve your automation rules over time.
• Consideration:
  • Zendesk suggests macros based on what’s been used before, which is helpful, but eesel AI allows for suggestions and actions that are more dynamic and understand the current situation better.
  • Using its AI Assistant browser extension, eesel AI can suggest relevant actions or responses based on a wider range of training data, including past tickets and internal standard operating procedures (SOPs), right within the agent’s workflow.

4. Article and ticket summaries

Nobody enjoys wading through really long ticket threads or dense knowledge base articles, especially when you’re trying to respond quickly. Zendesk AI can create short, easy-to-read summaries of ticket conversations and help center articles.

These summaries let agents quickly grasp the main points of a customer’s history or the core information in a document without having to read every single word. This saves a ton of time and helps agents get up to speed faster, which usually means quicker solutions for the customer.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It cuts down the time agents spend reading.
  • It helps them understand the situation better.
  • It allows them to handle tickets faster.
• Consideration:
  • Summaries are a great starting point, but sometimes agents need to look closer at the original source information.
  • eesel AI‘s AI Assistant can do more than just summarize. It lets agents have a conversation with their documentation and past tickets, giving them interactive access to knowledge and context directly within their browser. This makes it easier to get the full picture.

5. Agent assist and copilot features

Zendesk’s AI includes features specifically designed to help human agents right within their workspace. This includes suggesting draft replies based on the ticket content and relevant knowledge, kind of like the generative responses but tailored for the agent to use or edit.

This “copilot” feature helps agents write responses faster and makes sure they have access to the most relevant information without having to leave the ticket screen. It acts like a helpful assistant, reducing how much agents have to figure out on their own and letting them handle more complex issues with greater confidence.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It makes agents more efficient.
  • It helps improve the quality and consistency of responses.
  • It gives agents real-time support while they work.
• Consideration:
  • Zendesk’s agent assist mainly pulls from your help center content.
  • eesel AI‘s AI Assistant integrates directly into the agent’s browser via an extension. This means it can pull information and suggest replies based on a much broader set of connected knowledge sources, giving agents more comprehensive context and assistance drawn from all your company’s knowledge, not just what’s in the help center.

6. Knowledge base integration and training

A really key part of how Zendesk AI works is its connection to your help center knowledge base. The AI uses this content as its main source of information for features like autoreplies, generative responses, and agent assist. So, keeping your help center accurate and complete is absolutely necessary for the AI to work well.

Zendesk gives you tools to manage and update your knowledge base, making sure the AI has access to the latest information. The quality and how well you organize your articles directly impacts how well the AI can give relevant answers.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It provides the core information for AI-powered self-service options for customers.
  • It provides help for your agents.
• Consideration:
  • Zendesk mostly trains its AI on help center articles.
  • Lots of businesses have valuable knowledge scattered across other places like Google Docs, Confluence, or even just hidden in past tickets.
  • eesel AI really shines here because it lets you train bots on over 100 different sources with automatic syncing. This means your AI always has access to the most complete and up-to-date information, including valuable insights learned from past solutions and conversations.

7. Reporting and analytics

If you’re going to put money into AI, you need to know if it’s actually helping. Understanding the impact of AI is really important for figuring out the best support strategy. Zendesk provides reporting and analytics tools so you can keep track of how well its AI features are doing.

You can monitor things like deflection rate (how many questions the AI handled without a human agent stepping in) and see if agent productivity is getting better. These insights help businesses understand if they’re getting a good return on investment (ROI) from their AI and point out areas where the AI or your knowledge base might need some work.

• Why it’s useful:
  • It helps you measure how effective your AI is.
  • It finds gaps in your knowledge base.
  • It gives you data to make smart decisions about improving your support strategy.
• Consideration:
  • While Zendesk offers analytics, sometimes it’s hard to get deeper insights into why the AI succeeded or didn’t on specific interactions.
  • eesel AI provides detailed reporting, including a knowledge gap analysis feature that specifically points out areas where the AI couldn’t find an accurate answer. This makes it much easier to figure out exactly what missing or outdated information you need to add to your training data.

Zendesk AI capabilities vs. eesel AI: A comparison

Zendesk offers a bunch of useful AI capabilities, but it’s smart to think about whether they truly fit your specific needs, budget, and how your team already works. Often, the most powerful features, like Intelligent Triage, are only available if you pay for the Advanced AI add-on, which can really increase the cost per agent. Plus, Zendesk’s AI training is mostly limited to its own help center, and you don’t always have a lot of flexibility for advanced customization or testing.

This is where platforms like eesel AI offer a pretty interesting alternative. eesel AI integrates smoothly with Zendesk, but it approaches AI support a bit differently. It focuses on flexibility, training the AI on everything you know, and giving you clear, predictable pricing.

Here’s a quick look at how Zendesk AI and eesel AI compare in some key areas:

Tips for leveraging AI in your Zendesk support

Putting AI to work in your support workflow, whether you’re using Zendesk’s built-in tools or something that integrates with it like eesel AI, takes a little planning. Here are a few good ways to help you get it right:

• Start with clear goals: Figure out exactly what problems you want AI to solve. Maybe you want to cut down on those repetitive password reset tickets or speed up how quickly tickets get sorted.
• Keep your knowledge base in shape: Make sure your help center content is accurate, complete, and easy for the AI to understand. Tools like eesel AI can train on more than just your help center. They can pull knowledge from wherever it already lives, like your Google Docs or Confluence pages, making it easier to keep everything updated.
• Test things out properly: Before you roll out AI widely, test its responses and workflows on a small group or specific types of tickets. This helps you catch any errors and fine-tune how it performs. eesel AI offers dedicated simulation features and options for controlled rollouts, making testing before going live much simpler.
• Have a plan for when AI needs help: Your AI agent isn’t going to be able to handle everything. Make sure there’s a clear process for when it needs to pass a conversation to a human agent, and ensure all the context from the chat goes with it for a smooth handoff.
• Keep an eye on performance and make adjustments: Regularly look at how your AI is doing. Use those insights to improve the data you train it on, tweak your workflows, and update your content so the AI gets smarter over time.

Choosing the right AI path for your business

Zendesk AI capabilities offer some powerful ways to automate support tasks, make agents more efficient, and give customers a better experience. Features like intelligent triage, generative replies, and agent assist can definitely help streamline things. However, the way the costs are structured, especially for the more advanced features, and some limitations in how flexible the training and testing are can be big things to think about for many businesses.

For teams looking for an AI solution that’s more flexible, cost-effective, and powerful, and that integrates smoothly with Zendesk while offering broader training options and predictable pricing, eesel AI really stands out as a strong alternative. It lets you automate complex workflows, train your AI on all your knowledge sources, and scale your support smartly without those unexpected costs popping up.

Ready to see how smarter, more efficient AI support could work for you? Book a demo with eesel AI to get a personalized look at how it can transform your Zendesk workflows or start a free trial today!