We are excited to launch AI agents and automated resolutions!

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Posted Apr 25, 2024

Dear Customers,

We are excited to launch AI agents and preview the upcoming launch of automated resolutions! For ease of collecting  feedback on this launch, and to make sure we can provide you with quick  answers to your questions, we are providing this space for all feedback to be shared. Please comment below to share your thoughts and feedback, or ask questions about this release.

The product feedback forum in the Zendesk Community is always the best place to share information with our Product Teams around ideas you have for features or feedback you have about what we are building. This is where our product managers monitor and engage in conversation, and our aim is to aggregate all feedback here. 


Before posting, please take a moment to review the community guidelines and code of conduct. These outline how our product feedback forums work, how we review this feedback, and what you can expect. Take a look and let us know if you have any questions! 

Thank you for being a part of the Zendesk Community and sharing your feedback with us, we sincerely value your input!


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We're on the Zendesk Suite Growth Plan, so we'll be allowed 10 automated resolutions / agent /month.  What is an agent?  We have 3 seats in our plan and 50 light agents.  Given that, how many automated resolutions am I given in a month?

  • 30 (10 * 3 seats)
  • 500 (10 * 50 light agents) or
  • 530 

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Ryan McGrew I wanted to ask a followup question. AFAIK, we will begin getting charged on July 10th (today - please correct me if I'm wrong on that). In preparation, I shut down the bot last week.

 

Despite that, “resolutions” continue to pile up. I'm not sure what else needs to happen to make them stop so I can avoid being charged. The email autoresponder is also off/deactivated.

 

What specific sources of these resolutions might there still be?

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Brandon (729)

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderThe Humblident Award - 2021Community Moderator

LaChrystal Ricke - I believe only full agent seats count towards your resolution allowance, giving you 30 automated resolutions per month out of the box.

 

Winslow J - Not sure why your resolution # is increasing but, as I understand it, outcome / resolution based pricing will only go into effect for you on your next contract renewal date after July 10th.  I'm sure Ryan McGrew will be able to provide additional context here.

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Viachaslau ,

Thank you for your feedback. Direct responses from our customers influences our product roadmap and is the reason why you will start to see updates next week and with iterative improvements continuing until our launch on August 14th. We will always continue to listen to customers, learn more and adjust. 

When it comes to Advanced AI vs. AI Agents, our goal is to clearly delineate the capabilities and value that we provide to Agents and Admin and the automation provided to users. With Advanced AI, you have access to features that enable agents to perform more effectively and admins to build better workflows and reporting. With AI agents, you will be able to continue to use data capture capabilities as part of an agent conversation without incurring automated resolution costs. Automated resolutions will only be generated when an AI agent is able to resolve an issue without involving a human agent.

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Winslow J 

Hopefully I can clear this up for you quickly. A few points, you should have seen communication from us this week that we've extended the date to August 14th.  Additionally, as Brandon (729)  points out, this pricing comes into effect at your next renewal after that date. In your case, that's in December 2024 and you will not incur any charge before that date.

There are multiple automation capabilities beyond Zendesk Bots that provide Automated Resolutions.  There's more information in this article but this would includes autoreplies with article recommendations to tickets via triggers or via the webform in help center or via the legacy Web Widget. 

Included in your plan you have access to a set of free automated resolutions over the course of your contract term. For Suite Enterprise customers, that 15 ARs per agent per month over the course of your contract. On August 14th, we will roll out additional functionality for managing your automated resolutions, including capping your usage at your current subscription level so you never incur overages.  You'll also get more information on the usage for different automation features mentioned above.  

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Automated resolutions will only be generated when an AI agent is able to resolve an issue without involving a human agent.

Ryan McGrew  Once again, I have to emphasize that the custom answers we create are not technically AI-agent related (we usually create them when we need real customer data and we make API calls inside bot steps). But Zendesk will charge us as for AI-resolved issues.

 

Basically, we have (1) Generative AI replies based on our help center, and (2) manually created replies based on real customer data. We would love to have a generative AI replies based on our CRM, but Zendesk AI bots do not have such capability. 

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Brandon (729)  Thank you!  

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Ryan McGrew and Brandon (729) thank you for the additional information! While I did not receive any comms about the data change, I do see the updated timeline in the referenced article and appreciate the call-out.

Since I started using AI Bots in May 2024, but also updated my contract last month to add Advanced AI add-ons, please confirm that the new date of August 14, 2024 does not apply as my billing start date and that I am free to experiment without incurring usage charges until my next contract renewal data in December 2024.

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I have noticed that Zendesk considers an out-of hours business flow and automated resolution. We have a bot flow which checks business hours and if it is out of hours, we post a message and link to the ticket form. This is not a resolution as there is no other out-of-hours option; the chat won't be transferred to an agent and so will be liable to be charged. This seems unfair.
 

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Brandon (729)

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderThe Humblident Award - 2021Community Moderator

Hey Rachel Martin

 

The recommended solution here is to use the “Transfer to Agent” step, even if no agents are online.  The key is to specify in the step-language that the user is creating a support request.  The ticket will be created per usual, and when your staff logs in it will be there waiting for them.  This will also allow you to continue the conversation async via the widget and via email, and (as far as I know) will not be considered an automated-resolution by Zendesk.  Hope this helps!

 

Brandon

 

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Viachaslau,

AI Agents encompass automation on several channels including our Zendesk Bots capabilities. Automated resolutions will apply to all of these channels and features. All of them use AI in some way, through embedding models, our out of the box intent models, language classification, or generative AI. As you point out, Bots can rely on logical operators, branching flows, data capture and API integrations to solve customer problems as well. All bot products on the market charge either via the number of conversations engaged in or the numbers resolutions delivered regardless of the types of automations or machine learning models used and we see our pricing to be in line with that.

Can you explain more about what you're looking for in a CRM integration? What kind of data would you leverage from your CRM and what use cases would that serve for your customers? What CRM product are you using?

Thanks!

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Couldn't agree more with Viachaslau. AI agents should be just that, agents that use AI tolls to solve customers. A logic flow that admins made should not be counted as an AI agent as there were zero AI tools used to support this customer.

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Raul Winslow ,

I just wanted to respond back and confirm that you are free to experiment without incurring usage charges until my next contract renewal data in December 2024.

Thanks!

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Hi. 

 

Does anyone know where the option is to set a cap on the number of automated resolutions that can be consumed by your account each month?

I have had a look and cannot find the option anywhere for some reason

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Jeff Curran

Zendesk Employee

Hi Megan

You can find details on automated resolutions, including how to cap usage in the link below

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5352026794010-About-automated-resolutions-for-AI-agents

 

Let us know if we can provide more information. 

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With how frequent false positives are, I'd be surprised if the introduction of ‘Overages’ doesn't severely hurt your business, Zendesk. It's insane that you'd rollout these changes in this state, without the ability to report false positives. It renders a conversation bot virtually useless after a few customers leave the chat early unresolved, but using up your automations..

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Eric,

We’ve put specific controls in place to detect and exclude abandoned conversations and conversations that don’t provide a satisfactory resolution so that they are not counted as Automated Resolutions. Additionally, within the Bot conversation transcripts page you can provide feedback on the conversation that Zendesk reviews regularly. I’m going to ask our team to proactively review your recent conversations to determine if there’s anything unusual happening with your account. 

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Hi Zendesk,

 

we recently started using the AI article suggestions in our email receipt confirmation - in theory this was super easy to implement which was great - now analyzing results, it does not work exactly as we hoped (and unfortunately leads to unreal success stories in reporting etc.) 

We figured, a request would only be considered ai-auto-resolved IF the requester actually clicked on “Yes that was helpful/Close my request” > now we find several tickets, where the recipient did get the 3 article suggestions, viewed them (in some cases even marked them as unhelpful), never clicked on “yes this was helpful/close my request” and still the tag “ai_agent_automated_resolution” was added? This makes no sense to us, and also makes creating follow up triggers here quiet impossible/much trickier. As you can imagine, if a requester says an article solved their request, the ticket goes to solved status and noone on the team will ever see it, we do want to send a confirmation email for that as well. Letting the requester know that if that happened by accident or if they have further questions, to email us again. We built that trigger based on the tag “ai_agent_automated_resolution”

 

Now why is that tag being added to tickets where clearly it was not auto-resolved? How can we identify only tickets, where the requester clicked on “yes close my request” ?

**** Below only two of many many many examples where tickets should have never in any way be counted as automated_resolution - if this behaviour is not corrected we will have to turn this new exciting feature off again - Update 24 hours later: had to set this workflow to inactive again, as there really seems to be no way to cleary identify tickets that were indeed and truly auto-resolved by an article suggestion. Look forward to any updates here. 

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After contacting support, it looks like tickets that are deleted or marked as spam are also being counted as automated resolutions?

The support team is unable to clearly tell us where our usage is being used. The web-widget bot stores no contextual data and no report/metrics for the amount used by 'deleted tickets', which in my opinion, should not be charged in the first place. 

As others may have pointed out, automated resolution after 72 hours is too-harsh, e.g. we don't operate on weekends. That forces us to give a response in 1 business day, and that is assuming there aren't bank holidays before/after weekend. 

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello Yvonne P. 

Thanks for reaching out. The tag ab_resolved is added to the ticket when the customer marks the article as solving their problem (please note, this tag will soon be renamed to ar_marked_helpful). This should allow you to identify tickets which were closed for that reason only and use it in your triggers. Additionally, we are working on a small update for autoreplies such that clicks on unhelpful will never be marked as an automated resolution.

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Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello Jeremy Mifsud 

Looks like we've got an open ticket with you right now and my team is engaged with our Customer Advocate helping you out there. We'll work with you on the specific details there.

Thanks!

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There are so many “what if” scenarios here that it seems absurd to roll out this pricing before those scenarios are 100% settled.

 

“We have tools for false positives and this will continuously be improved”

 

Then charge us when it IS improved, not when we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Zendesk customers are going to be charged by resolution for things that are not truly resolved. Whether it is 1 false positive or 1,000, we should not be charged for any of them and we should not have to go through the effort of creating support tickets to get the false positive charges removed. It would probably cost me $100 worth of time to get $10 of false charges removed. 

 

I was so excited for advanced AI and was going to build so many cool things around it, but the pricing update took ALL the wind out of my sails and I don't want to go through the effort of building these tools if I just need to cancel the AI add-on when my contract is up. What a truly anti-customer move from a customer service company.

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Jeff Curran

Zendesk Employee

Hello Adam Vorisek

Thank you for reaching out and thank you for your feedback. 

 

First, we agree that you should not be charged in instances where AI agents don’t resolve a customer issue. That is exactly why we have gone to such lengths to ensure industry leading accuracy rates and why we commit to continually improving. 

 

Second, our Advanced AI SKU is agent productivity focused and, by and large, does not generate automated resolutions. You should feel comfortable using Advanced AI and not need to worry about usage-based costs. The one within Advanced AI that can generate automated resolutions is Intelligent Triage. If you would like to ensure that no additional costs are incurred, you have the ability to control usage through your Admin Center.

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Hi.

 

If you want to avoid incurring additional costs, you can control usage from the Management Center, but when I checked that page, it was as follows.

 

 

- Maintain functionality and allow usage overage
Impact on service

  • AI agents, including bots, will continue to respond to customers, saving agent time and improving the customer experience

Cost

  • Higher rates will apply for usage overage

 

- Suspend the feature and do not allow overage usage
Impact on service

  • AI agents, including bots, will not be able to respond to customers until auto-resolution is added
  • The number of requests forwarded to live agents will increase, resulting in increased first reply time and backlog
  • Auto-reply with article and auto-reply for intelligent triage will not be available for triggers
  • Web form recommended article suggestions will not be available

Cost

  • No additional cost

 

 

If you choose “Suspend functionality and do not allow overage”, won't that mean that the bot won't be able to respond to customers?

The increase in agent transfers is probably because, since the bot's automated responses are not available, customers have no choice but to ask an agent, and that's why there is an increase.
 

I also don't understand why the recommended articles for web forms can no longer be used. They were originally free, so why tie them in with the bot? It's a feature that's almost completely unrelated.

 

I don't understand this pricing structure at all.

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Jeff Curran

Zendesk Employee

Hello 小林正左子 - 

We aim to make our in-product experiences as simple as possible and we continue to iterate on these descriptors. Thank you for letting us know areas where we need to be more clear.

 

This management center page allows you to control what happens when you reach the current entitlement of automated resolutions (both included and paid). This gives you the flexibility to decide if you would like the use of AI Agents to continue beyond your current entitlement and be subject to Pay-As-You-Go pricing. 

 

To directly answer your question, choosing the “Suspend functionality” option means that instead of exceeding your current entitlement and being subject to additional costs, inquiries will be routed to an agent. This only applies when you exceed your current included and paid amount of Automated Resolutions and will not have any impact prior to reaching your limit. At any time, if a customer speaks, either by customer request or through the “suspend functionality” option, it will not be counted as an automated resolution. 

 

Article recommendations in Web form and in email are features that deliver automation to customers on channels other than our Messaging. AI Agents solve customer questions before an agent needs to get involved whether that’s via Bots in Messaging, or article recommendations in the web form. They’re all powered by AI technology that responds to customer questions and issues. These features have gone through pricing strategy shifts over the years and article recommendations in the web form, for example, haven’t always been free. Outcome-based pricing and automated resolutions aims to unify all of these AI automation capabilities under a single pricing structure. 

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Hi, Jeff Curran

 

Thank you for your response.

 

I have a few questions for you.
1. You explained that "choosing the 'Suspend functionality' option means that inquiries will be routed to an agent instead of incurring additional costs beyond your current entitlement." However, isn't "incurring additional costs beyond your current entitlement" incorrect? Shouldn't it be "no additional costs will be incurred beyond your current entitlement" instead?
2. You mentioned that "article recommendations in the web form have not always been free." Could you tell me where this explanation was provided to us customers? Also, is my understanding correct that these article recommendations refer to auto-replies?

 

Thanks.

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Jeff Curran

Zendesk Employee

Hello and thank you for following-up. 

 

We’ve included automated resolutions in your Support or Zendesk Suite plan so that you can try AI Agents easily and without additional cost. However, if your usage exceeds your current entitlement, you would be subject to usage-based billing for any overage. The ‘Suspend functionality’ option will prevent AI Agents from fully automating a customer inquiry by routing to an agent, either synchronously if agents are online or asynchronously through tickets, when you reach your current automated resolution entitlement. By doing this, it prevents you from incurring any unplanned costs associated with automated resolutions. 

 

To your second question, there was a cohort of our customer base that was paying per resolution for auto-replies in the web form. You can see more information about how that worked in this article. As we moved to the Suite, we began including a set of free usage for that product in the Suite. We’ve continued to do that with our free automated resolution entitlements. 

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I have the same concerns as most people posting here - inaccurate automated resolutions.  The problem for us is that customers have no idea their ticket is solved just because they Viewed an article.  We have an automated email trigger that goes out 1 day after resolution to tell them their ticket is solved and offering a CSAT survey.  They are surprised and UPSET by this which is causing unnecessary negative CSAT scores.  We have since implemented a new trigger telling them that ZenDesk thinks they just solved their ticket by viewing an article and did they really want that - this happens when the ticket moves to Solved.  This may help with the CSAT scores, but this is all unnecessary.  I think all of us would be a lot happier if an automated resolution happened ONLY when the customer marked it as solved.  There should be no interpretation by AI for resolution.  The customer most vote that their issue is resolved.

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Hey Rich Talbot simply looking at a sujjected article won't mark the ticket as solved. When the user clicks on the link they are presented with a popup near the bottom of the screen saying that they can mark this as solved.

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Rich Talbot absolutely agree ont this! We tested first in September 2024 - quit the topic as it was not working as it should. Just did another round of testing, while the status seems to not go to solved anymore when it shouldn't - the tag “ai_agent_automated_resolution” is still added when it shouldn't - added my feedback in another article . Hoping to see proper fixes here soon, as the feature itself would be really exciting if it would work 100% 

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408833721498-Using-autoreplies-to-recommend-articles-in-email-notifications 

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