How to use Zendesk AI suggestions to personalize refunds and exchange replies: A step-by-step guide

Let's be real: handling refunds and exchanges is a drag. For customers, it’s usually the sour end to a bad experience. For your support team, it's a repetitive task where one wrong word can make things ten times worse.

AI is supposed to make these things faster, but speed shouldn't mean sounding like a robot, especially when a customer is already annoyed. The good news is, you can have both speed and a human touch. This guide will walk you through exactly how to use Zendesk's built-in AI tools to improve your refund and exchange replies.

We'll start with the tools already inside Zendesk, but then we'll get into how to break past the built-in limits to get some seriously seamless and smart automation going.

What you'll need to follow along

Before we jump in, here’s a quick list of what you’ll need to have ready:

• A Zendesk suite plan: The AI agents and Copilot features are usually part of plans like Suite Professional or can be added on.

• Admin access: You’ll need to be an admin to get in and set up the communication guidelines for your AI.

• An existing knowledge base: Zendesk's AI relies heavily on your help center articles to come up with suggestions, so having a decent one is pretty important.

• (Optional) An eesel AI account: Later, we’ll talk about how you can connect eesel AI to your workflow to really boost your personalization and automation game, far beyond what Zendesk can do out of the box.

Step-by-step: Using Zendesk AI to personalize replies

Getting started with the tools inside your Zendesk account is a great first move. By adjusting a few settings, you can make a big difference in the quality of your AI-assisted replies.

Step 1: Define your brand voice

First things first, you need to tell your AI how you want it to sound. In Zendesk, you do this with communication guidelines. Just think of it as a style guide for your bot that keeps everything consistent.

According to Zendesk's own documentation, the best guidelines are specific and focused on tone, not just a list of rigid rules. Instead of just making a list, it's better to group them logically and give clear examples of what to do and what not to do.

For example, you could create a guideline for refunds that says something like: "Always start with an apologetic and professional tone. Acknowledge the customer's frustration before jumping into the solution." Then you could specify what to avoid, like casual slang ("no worries," "my bad") or making promises you can't keep about refund times. A good example might be, "I'm so sorry to hear that your item arrived damaged. I can definitely help you with a refund." A bad one would be, "No worries, we can refund that for you."

Setting these ground rules ensures every AI suggestion starts off on the right foot, giving your agents a much better foundation to work with.

Step 2: Use Copilot to refine replies

While guidelines set the overall tone, your agents still need to be able to tailor replies to each specific situation. This is what Zendesk Copilot and its "Enhance writing" tools are built for. These features let agents adjust the AI's output with a single click, right in the text box.

When dealing with refunds and exchanges, a few of these tools are especially helpful:

• Make more friendly: This is perfect for when a loyal, long-time customer has a small issue and you want to sound extra reassuring.

• Make more formal: You’ll want to use this for serious complaints, high-value orders, or business clients where a professional tone is a must.

• Rewrite in your tone: This is a pretty cool feature. It looks at the agent’s previous messages in that specific conversation to make sure the AI's suggested text matches their personal style.

Here’s how quickly it can change a reply:

• Before: "Refund processed. It will take 5-7 days."

• After (using "Make more friendly"): "Great news! I've just processed your refund. You should see it back in your account within 5-7 business days. Let us know if you need anything else!"

That small adjustment can completely change how a customer feels about the whole interaction.

Step 3: Clean up your help center

The truth about Zendesk's AI is pretty simple: the quality of its suggestions depends entirely on the quality of your knowledge base. If your help center is a jumble of outdated articles, your AI's suggestions will be just as confusing.

To get better Zendesk AI suggestions to personalize refunds and exchange replies, you need to give it clear, well-structured information to learn from. Here are a few things Zendesk recommends:

1. Create specific, single-topic articles. Don't cram everything into one giant "Returns Policy" page. Break it down into articles like "How to Request a Refund," "Exchanging an Item for a Different Size," and "Our Holiday Return Policy."

2. Use clear, question-based titles. Write your titles the way a customer would actually ask the question. "How long do refunds take to process?" works much better for an AI than a generic title like "Refund Timelines."

3. Keep the content focused. Every article should have one clear purpose and lead the reader to a single solution. This helps the AI find the exact piece of information it needs to answer a question.

If you spend a little time cleaning up your help center content on these topics, you'll notice an immediate improvement in how accurate and helpful the AI's suggestions are.

Limitations of Zendesk's native AI

While these steps will certainly help, you'll probably hit a few walls as you try to grow. Zendesk's own AI is a good starting point, but it has some limitations that keep it from being a truly automated, context-aware system.

It only knows about Zendesk. The AI is mostly stuck looking at your Zendesk help center and ticket history. It can't see important information your team might have in a process doc on Google Docs, technical specs in Confluence, or even just helpful tips from past tickets that never made it into an official article. This means you often get generic suggestions that lack key details.

It can't look up live data. The AI can tell an agent what to say about a refund, but it can't actually go and check an order status in Shopify or look up a customer's history in your CRM. Your agents are still stuck flipping between tabs to find the info they need to actually personalize the reply.

It suggests text, it doesn't take action. At the end of the day, Zendesk's Copilot is a text generator. It writes replies. It can't automate the refund process itself, like tagging the ticket for your finance team, updating a field, or starting the return in your e-commerce system.

Setup can be a guessing game. Fine-tuning the AI can feel a bit like shooting in the dark. There's no great way to simulate how it will perform on your real historical tickets before you turn it on, so you just have to activate it and hope for the best.

How eesel AI enhances personalization and automation

This is where a tool like eesel AI fits in. It doesn't replace your helpdesk. Instead, it plugs right into your existing setup (like Zendesk) and tackles the limitations we just talked about. Think of it as an intelligence layer that gives your team superpowers.

Bringing all your knowledge together

The first thing eesel AI does is connect to all of your company's knowledge, not just what's in Zendesk. This includes past tickets, macros, Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and pretty much anywhere else you store information.

This means when a customer asks for a refund on a "Model X Pro," eesel AI sees more than just the generic refund policy. It also sees the troubleshooting steps from dozens of similar past tickets and the official return instructions from a Google Doc. The result is a much more accurate and detailed reply that Zendesk's native AI just can't come up with on its own.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects to various knowledge sources like Google Docs, Confluence, and Notion to provide more context for personalizing replies.

Custom actions: Moving beyond basic text suggestions

Here's where things get really interesting. eesel AI can be set up to perform tasks, not just write text. You can configure its workflow engine to automate the whole refund process.

Imagine this scenario:

1. A customer emails asking for a refund.

2. eesel AI reads the ticket and uses a custom action to look up the order in Shopify.

3. It checks the purchase date to see if the item is eligible for a return.

4. If it is, eesel AI tags the Zendesk ticket as "Refund-Approved" and pings the finance team.

5. Finally, it drafts a personalized reply for your agent, confirming the refund has been started and even includes the order details it just found.

This isn't just a text suggestion, it's a complete workflow that saves your agent time and prevents manual errors.

Test and go live with confidence in minutes

Unlike big enterprise tools that involve long sales calls and complicated setup projects, eesel AI is built to be self-serve. You can sign up and get it running in a few minutes without having to talk to a salesperson.

Best of all, you can take the guesswork out of it with its simulation mode. Before you turn your AI agent on, you can test it on thousands of your past tickets. You'll see exactly how it would have responded, tagged, and resolved each one, giving you hard data on its performance. This lets you go live feeling completely confident that you know what to expect.

The eesel AI simulation mode shows how the AI would have handled past refund tickets, providing confidence before going live.

Zendesk AI suggestions are just the start

Using the AI tools already inside Zendesk is a great place to start. By setting clear communication guidelines and giving your agents access to Copilot, you can add a much-needed human touch to your refund and exchange replies.

But to really get efficient, you have to move beyond just drafting text. True personalization and automation happen when your AI has the full context from all your knowledge sources and the power to take action.

For teams who are ready to move from simply writing replies to automating entire processes, eesel AI is the natural next step. It enhances the tools you already know and love, helping you build a smarter support system without the headache of switching helpdesks.

Ready to automate more than just replies?

See how eesel AI can plug into your Zendesk account in minutes. You can run a simulation on your past refund tickets and see the difference for yourself. Try it for free today.