You must have the Advanced AI add-on to use some of the features described in this article.
No matter what industry you’re in, customer service interactions can make or break your business. Zendesk’s AI features are a powerful way to understand your customers’ needs from the moment they first contact you all the way through the customer service journey.
The best practices presented in this article help you make the most of Zendesk’s AI-powered insights to reduce costs, drive revenue, save time, and increase value.
Note: Many of the best practices in this article rely on Zendesk’s intelligent triage feature. Before diving in, take some time to understand how it works and turn it on. See Best practices for getting started with intelligent triage.
Select one of the buttons below to see best practices specific to your industry:
This article contains the following topics:
This article contains the following topics:
This article contains the following topics:
This article contains the following topics:
This article contains the following topics:
Related articles:
Retail: Reduce operational costs
With intelligent triage, you can harness customer intent to streamline operational workflows and power AI agents that can deflect some tickets from ever landing in your human agents’ queues. When tickets do need to be handled by an agent, suggested macros can help you make sure your agents are providing consistent support quickly and efficiently.
Best practices
- Monitor trends and spikes around customer request types, like product sizing, inventory tracking information, or returns, to pinpoint where to adjust customer service in real time, as well as inform long-term improvements to your operations. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
- Pinpoint common requests and provide relevant knowledge base content for those types of requests, further deflecting tickets and allowing shoppers to self-serve. See Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base.
- Review gaps in your macros via macros suggestions for admins to ensure that your agents have business-approved responses for trending conversations, like return policies, out-of-stock items, shipping issues, and more. See Creating macros from macro suggestions.
- Deflect easily solvable requests with AI agents that come pre-trained with retail-specific intents. These AI agents provide personalized 24/7 service, reducing costs and taking repetitive work off your support team’s plate. See About advanced bots.
Retail: Drive revenue and boost conversion rates
Zendesk’s AI-powered customer intent data can be a powerful tool when it comes to closing the sale.
Best practices
- Track customer intents related to checkout issues, like trouble applying a promo code or recognizing a payment method. Train agents to handle these issues to improve conversion and boost revenue. You might even consider creating a view for these types of issues to help agents find and prioritize these requests. See Creating views for automatically triaged tickets.
- Resurface items abandoned in the cart. If you use a third-party system like Magento or Shopify to track the user journey, you can pair this data with customer intent to improve conversion. For example, for intents related to checkout issues, you can make a call to an external API and offer a promo code or checkout guidance in the bot flow. See Using the Make API call step in a conversation bot.
- Push shopper consideration across the finish line by enabling shoppers to book in-person or virtual consultations or appointments with AI agents. See About advanced bots.
- Deeply personalize your customer experience by layering customer intent with historical information, like products purchased or past interactions, to recommend specific product offerings.
Retail: Save agents time
Sometimes customers don’t want—or need—to interact with a customer service representative. In those cases, offering a self-service option to allow the customer to resolve their own need is preferable, saving time for both your customers and your agents.
Best practices
- Simplify collaboration between teams by creating triggers that automatically send specific requests, based on the intent, to the appropriate department. You can even collaborate with teams outside of your Zendesk environment (for example, automatically forwarding requests to the warehouse for product availability questions). See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets and Use webhooks to pass information to external resources.
- Send automated replies to requests that have high-confidence-level intents so agents can focus on other, more complex conversations. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.
- Proactively request critical information from the customer by creating a workflow based on the request type so agents have all the information they need to start solving an issue by the time it’s assigned to them. See Proactively request more information.
Retail: Increase customer lifetime value and deepen brand loyalty
Layer customer sentiment and intent data with past interactions. This combination of information gives agents a single view to provide empathetic and personalized customer experiences.
Best practices
- Understand how the customer is feeling with sentiment analysis. Automatically assign negative sentiment conversations to a particular group of agents and escalate the priority using a trigger to help agents respond to their concerns. See Creating a routing trigger based on sentiment.
- Tailor SLAs based on customer intent and sentiment to help your agents prioritize what matters most. See Defining and using SLA policies.
- Connect AI agents with your front- and back-end systems like a CRM or external order system. These types of integrations can give agents historical information on customers’ past purchases, return history, loyalty information, and more to tailor the customer experience and ensure they keep coming back. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
Software: Reduce operational costs
With intelligent triage, you can harness customer intent to streamline operational workflows and power AI agents that can deflect some tickets from ever landing in your agents’ queues. When tickets do need to be handled by an agent, suggested macros can help you make sure your agents are providing consistent support quickly and efficiently.
Best practices
- Deflect easily solvable requests with AI agents that come pre-trained with software-specific intents. These AI agents provide personalized 24/7 service, reducing costs and taking repetitive work off your support team’s plate, like requests for password resets or subscription updates. See About advanced bots.
- Monitor trends and spikes around customer request types, like performance or product issues, to pinpoint where to adjust customer service in real time, as well as inform long-term improvements to your operations. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
- Pinpoint common requests and provide relevant knowledge base content for those types of requests (like registration, account support, or subscription cancellations), further deflecting tickets and allowing shoppers to self-serve. See Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base.
Software: Boost conversion rates and drive net retention
Zendesk’s AI-powered customer intent data can be a powerful tool when it comes to closing the sale.
Best practices
- Connect AI agents with your front- and back-end systems. These types of integrations can give agents historical information on customers’ subscription information, product usage, account management details, and more to tailor the customer experience and ensure they keep coming back. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
- Deeply personalize your customer experience by layering customer intent with historical information, like pages viewed or past interactions, to recommend specific product offerings.
- Drive revenue by proactively suggesting products based on license and subscription history, or by resurfacing items they may have looked at recently but never took action on.
- Deliver right-sized tech support that scales and drives brand loyalty with automated request routing. Incoming requests get to the right agent or agent group automatically based on customer intent, sentiment, and language. See Routing automatically triaged tickets.
Software: Save agents time
Sometimes customers don’t want—or need—to interact with a customer service representative. In those cases, offering a self-service option to allow the customer to resolve their own need is preferable, saving time for both your customers and your agents.
Best practices
- Simplify collaboration between teams by creating triggers that automatically send specific requests, based on the intent, to the appropriate department. You can even collaborate with teams outside of your Zendesk environment (for example, automatically forwarding payment questions to your finance team). See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets and Use webhooks to pass information to external resources.
- Send automated replies to requests that have high-confidence-level intents so agents can focus on other, more complex conversations. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.
- Proactively request critical information from the customer by creating a workflow based on the request type so agents have all the information they need to start solving an issue by the time it’s assigned to them. See Proactively request more information.
- Review gaps in your macros via macros suggestions for admins to ensure that your agents have business-approved responses for trending conversations, like subscription or product updates. See Creating macros from macro suggestions.
Software: Monitor performance
Layer customer sentiment and intent data with past interactions. This combination of information gives agents a single view to provide empathetic and personalized customer experiences.
Best practices
- Avoid potential escalations by proactively identifying trends in possible bugs or defects. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
- Understand how the customer is feeling with sentiment analysis. Automatically assign negative sentiment conversations to a particular group of agents and escalate the priority using a trigger to help agents respond to their concerns. See Creating a routing trigger based on sentiment.
- Tailor SLAs based on customer intent and sentiment to help your agents prioritize what matters most. See Defining and using SLA policies.
Financial services: Reduce operational costs
With intelligent triage, you can harness customer intent to streamline operational workflows and power AI agents that can deflect some tickets from ever landing in your agents’ queues.
When tickets do need to be handled by an agent, suggested macros can help you make sure your agents are providing consistent support quickly and efficiently. In regulated environments, suggested macros can also help ensure compliance with government regulations so that agents are providing only responses that have been pre-approved.
Best practices
- Monitor trends and spikes around customer request types, like pending transactions or payment issues, to pinpoint where to adjust customer service in real time, as well as inform long-term improvements to your operations. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
- Pinpoint common requests and provide relevant knowledge base content for those types of requests, like transaction history, balance inquiries, or fund transfers, further deflecting tickets and allowing shoppers to self-serve. See Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base.
- Review gaps in your macros via macros suggestions for admins to ensure that your agents have business-approved responses for trending conversations. See Creating macros from macro suggestions.
- Deflect easily solvable requests with AI agents that come pre-trained with financial service–specific intents. These AI agents provide personalized 24/7 service, reducing costs and taking repetitive work off your support team’s plate. See About advanced bots.
Financial services: Ensure compliance and reduce regulatory fines
Zendesk AI can help ensure compliance and reduce regulatory fines related to customers escalating time-sensitive complaints (like credit card chargeback disputes, or GDPR or CCPA requests) to regulatory bodies.
Best practices
- Automatically categorize compliance-related tickets using AI-powered intent and sentiment detection for better visibility. See Automatically detecting customer intent, language, and sentiment.
- Use time-based automations to prioritize and assign tickets to the right agent group. Reminders can also be sent to agents based on how long the request has been waiting in the queue to ensure that tickets are addressed within the legally required time limit. See Routing automatically triaged tickets.
Financial services: Drive revenue and boost conversion rates
Zendesk’s AI-powered customer intent data can be a powerful tool when it comes to closing the sale.
Best practices
- Offer customers 24/7 support with AI agents during the application process for a new product, such as a credit card or loan. Ensure customers receive customer support at the right time with tailored information to help them complete their applications. See About advanced bots.
- Keep VIP customers happy. For high-value clients, prevent automated replies from being sent to them and instead route them directly to an agent. And if a VIP submits a request with a certain sentiment (such as negative) or intent, make sure their request is escalated, sent to the right agent, and answered within your SLAs. See Workflow recipe: Using triggers to manage requests from important customers.
- Leverage AI-powered customer intent data together with product history to recommend personalized product and service offerings and improve conversion rates. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
- Deeply personalize your customer experience by layering customer intent with historical information, like transaction history or past interactions, to recommend specific product offerings.
Financial services: Save agents time
Sometimes customers don’t want—or need—to interact with a customer service representative. In those cases, offering a self-service option to allow the customer to resolve their own need is preferable, saving time for both your customers and your agents.
Best practices
- Use customer intent data to identify spam requests and prevent them from reaching agents’ views, so agents can focus on real requests. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.
- Simplify collaboration between teams by creating triggers that automatically send specific requests, based on the intent, to the appropriate department (for example, automatically forwarding suspect transactions to the fraud operations department). You can even collaborate with teams outside of your Zendesk environment. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets and Use webhooks to pass information to external resources.
- Send automated replies to requests that have high-confidence-level intents so agents can focus on other, more complex conversations. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.
- Proactively request critical information from the customer by creating a workflow based on the request type so agents have all the information they need to start solving an issue by the time it’s assigned to them. For example, questions about statements can be expedited by having an AI agent obtain non-sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) such as zip code and account number. See Proactively request more information.
Financial services: Increase customer lifetime value and deepen brand loyalty
Layer customer sentiment and intent data with past interactions. This combination of information gives agents a single view to provide empathetic and personalized customer experiences.
Best practices
- Track customer intents, like credit card payment issues, and train agents to handle these issues to improve retention and increase card usage. You might even consider creating a view for these types of issues to help agents find and prioritize these requests. See Creating views for automatically triaged tickets.
- Connect AI agents with your front- and back-office systems using customer data such as preferences and current products to provide upsell and cross-sell offers to existing customers. (For example, “You qualify for our new gold credit card. Would you like to learn more about this product?”) See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
- Understand how the customer is feeling with sentiment analysis. Automatically assign negative sentiment conversations to a particular group of agents and escalate the priority using a trigger to help agents respond to their concerns. See Creating a routing trigger based on sentiment.
- Tailor SLAs based on customer intent and sentiment to help your agents prioritize what matters most. See Defining and using SLA policies.
Insurance: Reduce operational costs
Give your teams the resources they need to do more with less.
Best practices
- Automatically prioritize and route tickets to insurance domain experts based on the intent and sentiment of incoming customer requests. See Automatically detecting customer intent, sentiment, and language.
- Create templated responses based on trends in the types of tickets your agents handle. Help agents maintain consistency in responses, especially for new hires. See Creating macros from macro suggestions for admins and Using suggested macros.
- Tailor SLAs based on customer intent and sentiment to help your agents prioritize what matters most. See Defining and using SLA policies.
Insurance: Save agents time
Sometimes customers don’t want—or need—to interact with a customer service representative. In those cases, offering a self-service option to allow the customer to resolve their own need is preferable, saving time for both your customers and your agents.
Best practices
- Deflect common inquiries and requests with AI agents that come pre-trained with insurance-specific intents, like policy and claim submission questions. These AI agents help you handle high-volume, low-effort tasks, giving agents time back to focus on more complex issues. See About advanced bots and Assigning AI-powered intents to answers.
- Send automated email replies to requests that have high-confidence-level intents so agents can focus on other, more complex conversations. See Creating triggers for automatically triaged tickets.
- Proactively request critical information from the customer to speed up claim processing time, updates, or certain requests by creating a workflow based on the request type. This way, agents have all the information they need to start solving an issue by the time it’s assigned to them. See Proactively request more information.
- Pinpoint common requests and provide relevant knowledge base content for those types of requests, further deflecting tickets and allowing customers to self-serve. See Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base.
Insurance: Boost conversion rates
Speed up claim processing time, calculate appropriate payout, and improve the customer experience.
Best practices
- Manage claims-related conversations and guide customers through the claims process using AI agents that come pre-trained with insurance-specific intents. This can help ensure customers actually complete the process, ensuring more revenue for your business. See About advanced bots and Assigning AI-powered intents to answers.
- Identify common customer requests that would benefit from an automated AI agent answer. Intent suggestions identify commonly asked but unanswered questions from customers that help you fill any gaps in your AI agent's knowledge. See Assigning AI-powered intents to answers.
- Leverage reporting and analysis to identify trends, areas of opportunity, and areas for improvement. Use this data to adapt your team’s customer service strategies. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
Insurance: Better detect and prevent fraud
Protect your business and your customers with AI-powered features that help you detect and take quick action against fraud-related activities.
Best practices
- Track customer intents to flag and route certain requests to fraud management experts accordingly. See Automatically detecting customer intent, sentiment, and language.
- Collect critical information and quickly escalate issues to the right team when fraud is detected. See Proactively request more information and Choosing a routing method for automatically triaged tickets.
- Report on customer request information to detect abnormal patterns and help prevent fraud-related activities. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.
Insurance: Increase customer lifetime value
Layer customer sentiment and intent data with past interactions. This combination of information gives agents a single view to provide empathetic and personalized customer experiences.
Best practices
- Connect AI agents with your front- and back-end systems like a CRM or external order system. These types of integrations can give agents historical information on customers’ past policy purchases, loyalty information, and more to tailor the customer experience and ensure they keep coming back. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
- Understand how the customer is feeling with sentiment analysis. Automatically assign negative sentiment conversations to a particular group of agents and escalate the priority using a trigger to help agents respond to their concerns. See Creating a routing trigger based on sentiment.
- Deeply personalize your customer experience by layering customer intent with historical information, like pages viewed or past interactions, to recommend specific product offerings.
- Drive revenue by proactively suggesting products based on intent or policy history, or by resurfacing items they may have looked at recently but never took action on.
IT & HR: Save staff time
Enhance your IT and HR workflows with AI agents and other time-saving AI features that help your teams collaborate more effectively and solve issues faster.
Best practices
- Deflect common questions with AI agents that come pre-trained to address repetitive questions around software licensing, leave policies, and more. This allows IT and HR teams to provide always-on service while freeing teams time to focus on more strategic or complex work. See About advanced bots and Assigning AI-powered intents to answers.
- Proactively request critical information from the employee by creating a workflow based on the request type, so IT and HR staff don’t have to spend time tracking down key information to start solving the issue. See Proactively request more information.
- Simplify collaboration between teams by creating triggers that automatically send specific requests, based on the intent, to the appropriate department. You can even collaborate with teams outside of your Zendesk environment (for example, automatically escalating employee contract questions to your legal team). See Choosing a routing method for automatically triaged tickets and Use webhooks to pass information to external resources.
- Send automated replies to requests that have high-confidence-level intents so IT and HR staff can focus on other, more complex conversations. See Choosing a routing method for automatically triaged tickets.
IT & HR: Reduce operational costs
Reduce the workload for your IT and HR teams by automating simple workflows and letting them focus on more complex issues.
Best practices
- Automatically prioritize and route tickets to specified groups based on intent and sentiment of employee requests. For example, automatically route issues related to employee misconduct to specific HR business partners, ensuring privacy. See Automatically detecting customer intent, sentiment, and language.
- Create templated responses based on trends for the tickets your IT and HR teams handle most. This creates standardization across internal service teams by maintaining consistency in responses to employees, especially for new hires. See Creating macros from macro suggestions for admins and Using suggested macros.
- Deflect simple questions by surfacing relevant knowledge base content, like content about password resets, leave policies, and holiday schedules. See Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base.
IT & HR: Monitor performance
Keep an eye on your IT and HR teams' performance with AI-powered predictions about employee sentiment and ticket trends.
Best practices
- Understand how employees are feeling with sentiment analysis. Automatically assign negative sentiment conversations to a particular group of staff and escalate the priority using a trigger to help the right person respond to their concerns faster. See Creating a routing trigger based on sentiment.
- Avoid potential escalations by proactively identifying trends in issues with company systems, policy, hardware/software and more. See Explore recipe: Intelligent triage predictions and confidence.