Evaluating the performance of AI agents using Zendesk QA: A 2026 guide

As more companies use AI agents to handle customer support, the conversation has changed. It's no longer a question of if you should use them, but how well they're actually doing their job. Ensuring every AI interaction meets your brand's standards is key to maintaining a great customer experience.

This is where a tool like Zendesk QA comes into the picture. It’s built to give you a deep look under the hood at your AI's performance. It shows you the vital data needed to keep your support operations running smoothly.

In this guide, we'll walk through how to use Zendesk QA for evaluating the performance of AI agents, covering its many strengths. We'll also discuss how to supplement its insights with proactive testing to ensure your AI is as helpful as possible from the very first interaction.

What is Zendesk QA for AI agents?

Zendesk QA for AI agents is a sophisticated feature inside the Zendesk suite that helps managers monitor conversations handled by their bots. The goal is to hold your AI to the same high standards as your human agents by checking for tone, accuracy, and resolution quality.

It boils down to a few main functions:

• Manual reviews: You can create custom scorecards and have your team grade bot conversations. This is perfect for ensuring that your AI reflects your brand's unique voice.

• Automated scoring (AutoQA): This powerful feature uses AI to automatically score 100% of your conversations. It checks for set categories like greetings, empathy, spelling, and tone across both human and bot interactions.

• Dedicated dashboards (BotQA): Zendesk provides a specialized dashboard with reports on key AI metrics. You can monitor how often the bot escalates to a human, identifying opportunities for further optimization.

It’s a robust toolset if your team is already utilizing the Zendesk ecosystem. It's designed to work seamlessly with Zendesk's own conversation bots, making it a reliable, integrated solution for quality management.

How to set up and use Zendesk QA

Getting started with Zendesk QA is a straightforward process of defining what a "good" interaction looks like for your team. From there, you use Zendesk's mature toolset to measure your AI against that standard.

Manual evaluations and scorecards

The starting point for manual reviews is the scorecard. This is where you lay out the criteria your AI will be judged by. You can set up scorecards to look at different parts of a conversation, from the opening greeting to the final resolution.

The process itself is intuitive: you filter your conversations to find the ones handled by a specific bot, pick an interaction, and then have a team member grade the bot's performance using the scorecard.

Using automated evaluation with AutoScoring

Zendesk’s AutoScoring provides comprehensive coverage by automatically evaluating every single conversation. It scans for specific, pre-set categories, including:

• Greeting and closing

• Spelling and grammar

• Tone and empathy

• Solution offered

This gives you a bird's-eye view of performance and can quickly flag conversations for closer review. It’s an excellent way to maintain consistent quality across thousands of interactions without needing to manually check every ticket.

BotQA dashboard metrics

The BotQA dashboard is your central hub for AI performance. It gathers all the data into a few key reports to give you a high-level view of how your bot is performing.

• Bot-only conversation rate: This shows you the percentage of conversations your AI handled all by itself. It’s a great way to measure your deflection rate and see the efficiency of your automation.

• Escalation rate: This metric tells you how often customers move from a bot to a human agent. Monitoring a healthy escalation rate helps you refine your AI's knowledge over time.

• Bot looping rate: This tracks how often a bot might repeat an answer, allowing you to fine-tune the conversation flow for a better user experience.

• Bot negative sentiment rate: This report highlights conversations where the tone was flagged as negative, helping you identify and address common customer pain points.

Important considerations when evaluating the performance of AI agents using Zendesk QA

While Zendesk QA is a powerful tool for reviewing performance and maintaining standards, there are a few strategic considerations to keep in mind to get the most out of your AI strategy.

Maximizing performance in complex scenarios

Zendesk QA is exceptional at analyzing conversations as they happen or shortly after. To further enhance this, teams can use proactive testing to prepare for the messier, real-world questions customers often ask. Real customer questions can sometimes be vague or involve multi-part requests, and Zendesk QA provides the data you need to identify these trends.

Think about the kinds of questions that help you refine an AI:

• Vague questions: When a customer says "it's broken," Zendesk QA helps you see how your bot handles the request so you can train it to ask the right follow-up questions.

• Multi-part questions: Zendesk QA lets you review if your AI correctly addressed multiple requests in one message, such as password resets combined with shipping queries.

• Troubleshooting questions: By reviewing step-by-step interactions, you can see where your AI might benefit from more detailed documentation.

Using the insights from Zendesk QA, you can continuously improve your bot's logic and substance, ensuring it handles every nuance with professional care.

Expanding your AI's knowledge base

Zendesk QA is a cornerstone of the Zendesk ecosystem, providing deep integration with native tools. To get the best results, it’s helpful to ensure your AI has access to all the information it needs, whether that’s in your official help center or spread across other internal documents.

Your company's knowledge might live in Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, or internal wikis. While Zendesk QA helps you spot when an answer might be missing, a platform like eesel AI can complement your setup by connecting these scattered sources into a single brain for your AI to use within your Zendesk workflow.

Complementing QA with proactive simulation

For teams that want to ensure a perfect experience before a new bot goes live, proactive simulation is a great addition to the standard QA process. While Zendesk QA is excellent for monitoring live performance, simulation allows you to test your new AI agent against historical data first.

A platform like eesel AI offers a simulation mode that works alongside your Zendesk setup. You can test your AI on thousands of past tickets to forecast your resolution rate before it ever affects a customer. This allows you to combine Zendesk's robust monitoring with a data-backed pre-launch strategy.

Flexible and scalable pricing

Zendesk QA is designed to be a flexible part of your support toolkit. It is typically available as a paid add-on, allowing you to choose the level of sophisticated Advanced AI features that fits your budget. This tiered pricing structure ensures that as your team grows, you can scale your quality assurance tools accordingly.

Beyond Zendesk QA: A better way with proactive simulation

By combining reactive QA tools with a proactive approach, you can build an AI support system that is both smarter and more dependable. This strategy relies on two pillars: proactive simulation and unified knowledge.

See how you'll perform before you launch

Imagine having a clear picture of your AI's resolution rate before it interacts with a single customer. Simulation allows you to test your AI agent against thousands of real, historical support tickets in a safe environment.

eesel AI provides this as a core complementary feature. You can connect your helpdesk and quickly see how the AI would have handled past interactions. This provides a data-backed report on resolution rates, giving you the confidence to deploy your AI knowing exactly how it will perform.

Building a smarter AI by connecting all knowledge

A modern AI agent performs best when it has access to all of your company's information. While traditional setups might focus on a single help center, an integrated approach connects everything your team knows.

This video explains the first of three steps to implementing Zendesk QA, a key process in evaluating the performance of AI agents.

eesel AI enhances your Zendesk experience with one-click integrations for over 100 sources like Notion, Slack, and Google Docs. By providing your AI with full context, you improve the quality of every conversation and reduce the need for escalations.

Zendesk QA pricing in 2026

Zendesk QA is a high-value tool that is usually added to your existing plan. Its advanced capabilities for AI agents are often part of the Advanced AI add-on, which can be added to any Zendesk Suite plan.

This structure allows you to build a custom solution that fits your specific enterprise requirements.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Features Included	QA & Advanced AI Add-ons
Suite Team	$55	Ticketing, Messaging, Help Center	Advanced AI: Available, QA: Available
Suite Professional	$115	Everything in Team + Advanced reporting, SLAs	Advanced AI: Available, QA: Available

Move from looking back to planning ahead

Zendesk QA is a reliable and mature tool for teams that want a professional way to perform quality checks on their AI agents. It offers a powerful dashboard and a proven process for maintaining high standards within a trusted ecosystem.

By complementing Zendesk's features with unified knowledge and proactive simulation, modern teams can deploy AI with total confidence. The future of quality control is a blend of monitoring live performance and preparing for success through detailed testing.

eesel AI is the perfect partner for this proactive approach, giving you the tools to test, build, and deploy alongside your Zendesk setup.

Ready to see how your AI will perform? Simulate your AI agent on your historical tickets with eesel AI for free. Enhance your customer support in minutes.

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