Zendesk AI voice assistants: A complete 2024 overview

Let's be honest, voice support is as important as ever. When customers have a tricky problem, they still want to pick up the phone and talk to someone who can help, fast. AI is shaking things up in this space, promising to handle the simple calls so your team can focus on the tough stuff. Naturally, Zendesk has an answer for this with its AI voice assistants.

But what you see in the slick marketing materials isn't the whole story. We’re here to pull back the curtain on Zendesk's voice AI. We'll break down what it is (and isn't), how all the pieces fit together, what it really costs, and where you might run into trouble. Think of this as the practical guide you need before making a big decision.

What are Zendesk AI voice assistants?

Here's the first thing to know: "Zendesk AI voice assistants" isn't a single product you can just flip a switch on. It’s more like a toolkit of different AI features that you have to buy and assemble yourself to get a working voice automation system.

When you put it all together, the goal is to do three main things:

1. Handle incoming calls automatically: An AI bot answers the phone, figures out what the customer needs, and tries to solve the issue without passing it to a human.

2. Help out your human agents: If a call does get escalated, an AI "copilot" can listen in, giving your team members real-time suggestions, notes, and summaries.

3. Analyze calls after they end: Once the call is over, the system creates transcripts and reports to help with quality checks and spotting what customers are frequently calling about.

It all sounds pretty good, but the catch is that these features are a mix of Zendesk's own tools, partnerships with other companies, and a bunch of paid add-ons. This can make both the initial setup and day-to-day management a real headache.

The core components of Zendesk AI voice assistants

To get the full Zendesk AI voice experience, you need to string together a few different parts. Let's take a look at what each one does and the potential snags.

AI agents for voice (powered by PolyAI)

This is the AI that actually answers the phone. It's designed to be the first point of contact, handling customer questions on its own. It can look up order statuses, answer FAQs, and decide if a problem is complex enough to need a human agent.

But here’s a surprise: this key piece of the puzzle isn't actually built by Zendesk. It's powered by a partnership with PolyAI, a separate company that specializes in voice automation. While their tech is solid, this setup can cause some friction. You might end up working with a different interface, contacting a separate support team, and dealing with a product that Zendesk doesn't directly control.

Agent copilot for voice

When a call is too much for the AI and gets handed off to a person, the Zendesk Copilot is meant to jump in. This tool acts as a real-time assistant for your agent. It can summarize what the customer already told the bot, suggest answers, and find relevant articles in your knowledge base.

The only problem? It’s not included. To give your agents this copilot, you have to buy it as a separate add-on, which means another line on your bill and another thing to configure.

This video demonstrates how the Zendesk Copilot for Voice provides real-time AI assistance to agents during calls.

Post-call transcription and quality assurance (QA)

Knowing what happened on a call is essential for training, checking for compliance, and understanding your customers. Zendesk's AI can transcribe calls and even use its Quality Assurance (QA) feature to automatically score conversations against your standards.

But, you guessed it, these tools are also locked behind an extra paywall. They’re part of the Zendesk Quality Assurance add-on, so you have to pay more for the basic visibility you need to see if your voice support is actually working well.

This cobbled-together approach is pretty common with older, bigger platforms. In comparison, newer solutions like eesel AI are built to be much simpler. It plugs directly into your existing Zendesk account to give you one unified AI layer. You get automation, agent help, and analytics all in one place, managed from a single dashboard, without the pain of juggling different products.

A workflow diagram that contrasts Zendesk's approach with the unified automation of eesel AI.

The reality of setting up Zendesk AI voice assistants

If you're a manager, be prepared for the setup process to be longer and more involved than you might think.

A long and winding purchasing process

You don't just add Zendesk's voice AI to a shopping cart. You have to go through a multi-step buying process that usually looks something like this:

1. First, pick a base Zendesk Suite plan.

2. Then, add the Zendesk Copilot for your agents.

3. Next, add the Zendesk QA add-on for your analytics.

4. You might also need the Advanced AI add-on for smarter features.

5. Finally, you have to set up and likely pay for the PolyAI integration to get the actual voice bot.

This can mean sitting through multiple sales calls, watching separate demos, and signing different contracts, which really drags out the whole process. Something that could take a few minutes with a self-serve tool can easily turn into weeks or even months.

Juggling different systems

Once you've bought all the pieces, getting them to work together isn't straightforward. You might be setting up call routing rules in one part of Zendesk, tweaking the Copilot in another, and then logging into a completely separate PolyAI dashboard to adjust how the voice bot talks to customers. This disconnected setup makes it tough to manage and creates more chances for things to go wrong.

The challenge of a siloed knowledge base

Okay, this is one of the biggest hurdles you'll face. Zendesk's AI mostly learns from content stored inside Zendesk, like your help center articles.

But what if your team, like most teams, keeps its most important and up-to-date info somewhere else? Think Confluence pages, Google Docs, or Notion. The Zendesk voice assistant can't see any of it. This leaves you with two not-so-great choices: spend months on a painful migration project to move everything into Zendesk, or accept that your AI will often give incomplete or outdated answers.

This is exactly the kind of problem a tool like eesel AI was designed to fix. It can be up and running in minutes because it connects to Zendesk and all your other knowledge sources with one-click integrations. Instead of moving your data, you just connect it, giving your AI the full picture from day one.

An infographic explaining how eesel AI integrates knowledge from multiple sources to power its automation, a key advantage over Zendesk AI voice assistants.

Understanding pricing for Zendesk AI voice assistants

The total cost for Zendesk's voice AI is a lot more than just the price of a monthly plan. It’s a tangled web of expenses that can be hard to pin down.

Base plan costs: Zendesk Suite

First, you need a Zendesk Suite plan. This is the foundation that gives you the basic ticketing system and phone line.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Features Included
Suite Team	$55	Ticketing, messaging, help center, basic voice
Suite Professional	$115	Everything in Team + SLAs, advanced reporting
Suite Enterprise	$169	Everything in Professional + custom roles, sandbox

Note: Prices are based on publicly available information as of late 2024 and may be subject to change.

The hidden costs of required add-ons

On top of that base price, you have to tack on the hidden costs for all the add-ons needed for a complete voice AI solution. These often include:

• Advanced AI Agents: For smarter, pre-built automation.

• Copilot: The agent-assist tool is a separate purchase.

• Zendesk Quality Assurance: Automatic call scoring is another add-on.

• PolyAI Integration: The main voice bot is from a third party, and that usually comes with its own licensing fees.

• Usage Fees: Some features, like call transcriptions, might have extra per-minute costs that are nearly impossible to predict.

This pricing model can lead to some serious sticker shock when the bill arrives, especially as your call volume grows. For comparison, eesel AI's pricing is designed to be clear and predictable. All the main products (AI Agent, Copilot, Triage) are included in one subscription based on how many customer interactions you have, with no surprise fees for every problem it solves.

eesel AI Plan	Price (billed annually)	AI Interactions/mo	Key Features
Team	$239/mo	1,000	Train on docs, Copilot, Slack/Teams
Business	$639/mo	3,000	Everything in Team + train on past tickets, AI Actions (API calls), simulation

Are Zendesk AI voice assistants the right choice?

So, after all that, should you go with the Zendesk AI voice assistant solution?

For huge companies that are already all-in on Zendesk and have the tech team and budget to match, it can be a powerful set of tools that works within their existing system.

However, for most teams, it’s just too complicated. It’s a pain to buy, a challenge to set up, and it forces your knowledge into a silo, which stops the AI from being as helpful as it could be. The messy, layered pricing also makes it really tough to figure out what you'll actually be paying each month.

A simpler, more powerful alternative to Zendesk AI voice assistants

If that all sounds like a headache you'd rather avoid, there's a better way. eesel AI was built to solve these exact problems by offering a single, powerful, and easy-to-use AI layer for your whole support team.

Here’s what makes eesel AI different:

• Go live in minutes: You can set everything up yourself on a self-serve platform. It just takes one click to integrate with your helpdesk.

• Unify all your knowledge: Instantly connect Zendesk, Confluence, Google Docs, and over 100 other apps without moving a single file.

• Enjoy transparent pricing: Our plans are simple and predictable. You get all the core features without worrying about hidden per-resolution or per-minute fees.

• Test with confidence: Use our simulation mode to see how the AI would have handled your past tickets. You'll get an accurate forecast of its performance and your ROI before you even turn it on for customers.

Ready to see how simple AI automation can be? Get started with eesel AI for free and connect your helpdesk in a few minutes.