AI is really shaking things up in how businesses handle customer support. It promises faster answers and making things run smoother. But, you know, with big power comes big responsibility, especially when you’re handling sensitive customer info. If you’re using a platform like Zendesk and thinking about its AI features, you’re probably wondering about the security side of things. How exactly is your data looked after? What about privacy and staying compliant with regulations?
Getting a handle on Zendesk AI’s approach to data, privacy, and control is super important. This post is going to walk you through how they do things, point out the key stuff you absolutely need to know, and touch on a few areas where you might want a bit more fine-grained control. While Zendesk does have AI built-in, sometimes looking at alternatives like eesel AI can actually give you better control over your data and make costs more predictable, which is a pretty big deal in the support world.
What is Zendesk AI and why security matters
So, let’s break it down: what exactly is Zendesk AI? Zendesk offers a few different AI-powered features designed to make support workflows easier.
You’ll find different types of AI within Zendesk:
- Basic Zendesk AI: This comes with their Suite plans and gives you things like autoreplies and generating response drafts.
- Advanced AI add-on: This includes the more advanced stuff, like smart ticket sorting and richer help for agents.
These tools basically help automate tasks, suggest answers, and get tickets to the right place faster.
If you’re using Zendesk, you might bring AI into the picture using their native features or through third-party apps. An example of this is eesel AI, which actually works with your existing Zendesk setup to make it even better. You can see how eesel AI fits in with Zendesk right here: Zendesk integration page
Now, why is security such a big deal when we talk about AI in customer support? Just think about all the information that passes through support tickets every single day: names, emails, phone numbers, what people have bought, payment info, maybe even really sensitive personal or health stuff depending on what business you’re in. Letting AI work with this data brings new potential risks. If there’s a data breach, it could be absolutely terrible. We’re talking huge fines (hello, GDPR!) and, honestly, probably worse, completely losing your customers’ trust. Having strong security isn’t just about checking off boxes; it’s totally fundamental to keeping your business’s good name and staying on the right side of the law.
How Zendesk handles your data for AI
Zendesk says that building AI responsibly is part of their promise to offer products you can trust. They build in privacy, security, and compliance right from the start. They also point to their Trust Center and various security certifications like ISO and FedRAMM to show they’re serious about this. You can dig into more details on their data use information page.
When it comes to their own machine learning models (the ones that don’t create free text), Zendesk mentions they don’t produce written content. Instead, they generate things like labels or classifications. Because of this, they feel these models don’t run the risk of customer data being copied or shared improperly.
They also take steps to clean up data used to train these models:
- Taking out things that identify someone (username, email).
- Using natural language processing to remove certain identifying info from free text fields.
For some of their advanced AI agents (specifically on the Ultimate plan), customers actually get to decide how to clean up the training data themselves, which offers more control. Zendesk makes it clear that the datasets used for training aren’t stored inside their models, and your customer data is still covered by their standard security and privacy promises.
For the generative AI features, which use third-party large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Zendesk uses models that are already trained. They specifically state that these third parties won’t use your inputs to train their models or make their services better in any way.
When they process customer data through OpenAI, Zendesk uses ‘zero data retention’ setups. This means the data is only processed temporarily in the computer’s memory and isn’t saved onto a disk. For customers in Europe who need data to stay local, Zendesk uses OpenAI’s special endpoints for the EEA and Switzerland.
While Zendesk gives you this overview of how they handle things, getting really specific control over exactly which data points within tickets are used for training or processing might feel a bit less flexible unless you’re on the Ultimate tier with its sanitation options. This is why some businesses might start looking at other options. For instance, eesel AI lets you customize where the AI learns from. You can tell it exactly what knowledge to use (including past tickets, specific documents like Google Docs or Confluence pages, and lots more).
It also has features to test out responses before they ever talk to a customer. This gives you more direct control over what your AI knows and how it acts.
Privacy and compliance with Zendesk AI
Keeping compliant with privacy rules isn’t something you can skip when you’re handling customer data. Zendesk says its AI features are built with compliance in mind, pointing to their various certifications and controls that help meet rules like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. They also clarify that using Zendesk AI features doesn’t change your current agreement(s) with them, including any Data Processing Addendums (DPAs) you might have.
They’ve also added extra safety measures and controls specifically for managing customer data with their generative AI features. These include:
- Options for targeted encryption.
- The ability to choose what data is shown or kept.
- Logging access so you have better security and can see what’s happening.
Zendesk gives an example of how their system has safeguards for sensitive info, like automatically sending tickets with medical history straight to a human agent.
Even with these steps, finding and handling all sensitive data hidden within the free text of support conversations can be tricky. Sometimes, companies use extra tools, like third-party apps designed to remove sensitive info from tickets, to add another layer of data security.
While Zendesk has put safeguards in place, making sure that AI actions and responses never accidentally show sensitive data takes serious testing and setting things up just right. This is an area where tools that let you really test things out can be super valuable. eesel AI, for example, lets businesses thoroughly test how their AI will respond in different situations, including ones with sensitive data, before the AI goes live.
This gives you an extra layer of control and confidence that your AI won’t accidentally share information it shouldn’t.
Control and actionability: Zendesk AI vs. eesel AI
When we talk about AI in support, ‘control’ means getting to say what the AI learns from, how it talks, when it does things, and how it deals with sensitive or tricky cases. It’s all about making sure the AI works for you, exactly the way you need it to.
With the AI built into Zendesk, your control points include:
- Picking your Help Center as the main source of info.
- Setting basic tones (like “Professional” or “Friendly”).
- Setting up smart rules for sorting tickets (if you have the Advanced AI add-on).
- Using suggested macros.
These features are a solid place to start with automation. But, there are some limits:
- Customizing things can feel pretty basic with just preset tones.
- You don’t get many options to test things before they go live.
- You don’t get super detailed control over how the AI decides to respond or the ability to easily set up complex, multi-step actions based on what’s in a ticket.
This is where eesel AI comes in as an option that gives you more control and lets the AI do more. Let’s see how it stacks up:
- Training Control: Instead of mostly being limited to your Help Center, eesel AI lets you teach your AI using a much wider variety of sources. This includes past tickets, Google Docs, Confluence pages, PDFs, external wikis, and over 100 other integrations. Plus, it syncs automatically, so your AI’s knowledge is always current. This means you get a more complete and relevant knowledge base compared to just using Help Center articles.
- Response Customization: eesel AI lets you customize things really deeply. You can fine-tune the AI’s tone, how it phrases things, and its specific answers using custom prompts and actions. This helps make sure your AI truly sounds like your brand, whether that’s being empathetic, formal, or really casual.
- Testing & Simulation: A big plus here is eesel AI’s simulation feature. You can test how your AI will respond to old tickets or specific situations and tweak its behavior before it ever talks to a real customer. This really lowers the chance of getting wrong answers or sending tickets to the wrong place.
- Actionability: eesel AI does more than just answer questions; it can actually do things. You can set it up to automatically send tickets to a human agent when certain things happen (like if it’s super urgent), add specific tags based on what the customer wants or how they feel, or even trigger custom API calls to do things like give refunds, update user accounts, or check order statuses. This ability to take action offers a much deeper level of automation and control over how your support team works compared to just basic generated replies.
- Cost Control: We mentioned this earlier, but it’s worth saying again. eesel AI uses a pay-per-interaction model. This tends to be more predictable and better value than Zendesk’s per-agent fees combined with potentially high costs based on how many issues the AI resolves, especially as you get bigger. This model ties directly into keeping costs under control and scaling predictably without unexpected charges.
Feature | Zendesk AI | eesel AI |
---|---|---|
Training Sources | Primarily Help Center | Past Tickets, Docs, Wikis, 100+ Integrations |
Customization Depth | Basic preset tones | Fine-tune tone, phrasing, specific answers |
Pre-Live Testing | Limited/Difficult | Robust simulation and testing features |
Automated Actions | Basic routing, suggested macros | Escalation, tagging, custom API calls, workflows |
Pricing Model | Per-agent + per-resolution (Advanced AI) | Pay-per-interaction |
Picking the right AI solution for your secure support needs
Navigating the world of AI in customer support means really thinking about not just the cool features, but also the super important stuff like security, data privacy, and control. We’ve looked at how Zendesk AI handles data and compliance, going over their methods for cleaning up data and using third-party LLMs. We also talked about the level of control you get with Zendesk’s built-in AI features compared to what’s possible with something like eesel AI.
When you’re trying to figure out which AI solution is the best fit for you, think about:
- How sensitive the data you deal with every day is.
- Your specific rules for compliance and whether the vendor’s stated measures are enough, or if you really need more detailed control.
- How important it is for you to be able to thoroughly test how your AI will act before it goes live.
- Your budget and how the pricing will change as your support volume grows.
Zendesk AI might be just right if you’re looking for basic AI features that work smoothly within the Zendesk platform and you’re okay with its set controls and pricing. But, if your team needs more flexible ways to train the AI (including being able to train it on past conversations), wants to customize AI responses and actions more deeply, values being able to test things thoroughly beforehand, and wants to scale predictably and affordably without per-agent fees or potentially surprising resolution costs, then eesel AI could be a better match.
Wrapping up and what to do next
Bringing AI into customer support has amazing potential, but it’s absolutely crucial to put security, data privacy, and control first. Understanding how platforms like Zendesk handle your valuable customer data is the first big step. While Zendesk offers built-in AI features with stated security measures and compliance efforts, the amount of control and flexibility might not work for every business, especially as they grow or handle more complicated situations.
Solutions like eesel AI are built to work alongside and improve platforms like Zendesk, giving you more control, flexibility, and predictable costs. By letting you tailor your AI exactly to your security and how you need things to work, train it on all sorts of data sources, and really test its behavior, eesel AI helps you grow your support confidently and securely.
Ready to see how having more control and actionability with AI can help your support team? Take a moment to think about what your specific security and control needs are. Then, maybe consider checking out eesel AI as a powerful, flexible, and cost-effective option for boosting your Zendesk AI capabilities.
Head over to the eesel AI website to find out more, or you can book a demo to see eesel AI in action or, why not start a free trial today?