As eCommerce continues to grow, customer support is becoming increasingly important. Customers demand quick and efficient solutions to their problems, and companies are struggling to keep up. Fortunately, several technology companies are stepping up to provide solutions that make the customer support experience more efficient, accurate, and personalized.

One such company is Zendesk, which recently announced at their annual Relate conference a brand new set of AI capabilities seamlessly integrated across their entire Support suite. The new AI capabilities are designed to improve customer support across a range of industries. This is great news for eCommerce retailers, who are increasingly investing in Conversational Commerce – a way of driving sales and engagement through personalized conversations with customers.

Despite the hefty investment in AI automation, Zendesk isn't planning on automating service representatives out of a job, Jon Aniano - SVP of product for Zendesk CRM applications, noted. Instead, he's confident that their new AI tools will make Customer Service teams even more valuable to their companies, not replaceable.

"When we talk about automation in customer service, a lot of people leap ahead and say, 'If we automate all of customer service, there won't be customer service anymore'," Aniano said. "That's pretty way off base from what I've seen in the industry. Currently, the demand for great customer experiences, for emotionally connected customer experience, far outstrips the supply, and automation will bring that back into balance, but it's not going to eliminate it.”

AI Customer Service

New Zendesk AI capabilities can be enabled by setting up the Zendesk Advanced AI add-on and includes the following key features:

Advanced bots

Enhanced, pre-trained bots for messaging and email automatically solve issues and leverage the most extensive database of customer intents for more personalized, industry-specific and accurate responses.

Agent assistance

AI-powered insights and suggestions improve agent productivity by allowing agents to quickly solve customer issues and use AI-generated content to respond faster, with proper context.

Intelligent triage

Use intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis via the new intelligent triage functionality to create powerful intelligent workflows that get smarter over time, classify incoming customer requests and allow teams to power workflows based on these insights.

In addition, Zendesk recently announced a partnership with OpenAI, unveiling new features that leverage the power of generative AI. This includes response rephrasing and tone shift, which helps agents craft clearer and thoughtful responses to customers. These updates save substantive time and effort for agents.

Conversational Commerce

Shopify, one of the leading eCommerce platforms, is a big proponent of Conversational Commerce. By leveraging chatbots, messaging apps, and other communication channels, Shopify merchants can create more personalized shopping experiences for their customers. And with the new Zendesk AI capabilities, they can now provide more efficient and effective customer support as well.

But Shopify isn't the only company working to improve the customer support experience. agnoStack, an SaaS eCommerce customer support company, recently launched their brand new "Zendesk AI for Commerce" solution. This solution integrates seamlessly with Shopify, as well as other eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce, commercetools, Adobe Commerce/Magento, WooCommerce, and Elastic Path.

The new Conversational Commerce capabilities equip companies with:

Service personalization

Agents can action abandoned carts, support active carts, inform customers on nearby stock to complete purchases, and share feature promotions in the moment to create stellar personalized experiences.

Sales acceleration

Agents can identify new revenue opportunities by understanding any shopper's complete purchase history, merchandise preferences and browsing journey to drive new options through rich product recommendations for cross-sell and upsell, increasing overall order value.

Unified data at scale

Businesses can use AI to automate conversions and recommendations supported by over 1,400 pre-built apps and integrations that can unify SKU, inventory and location data for seamless product tracking, or connect disparate systems for a 360 view of the customer.

Zendesk AI Suite

So what exactly does the new Zendesk AI suite (as well as the new Zendesk AI for Commerce solution by agnoStack) offer eCommerce retailers? At the recent Zendesk Relate user conference, the company announced several AI-powered capabilities, including advanced bots for handling customer inquiries and AI-powered assistance for customer service agents. The system also integrates intelligent triage capabilities that use sentiment analysis and intent detection to help route requests properly.

But Zendesk's history with AI and large language models goes back much further than this recent announcement. In fact, the company has been using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to improve their customer support platform for years. They even partnered with OpenAI to develop a language model that could generate personalized responses to customer inquiries.

This partnership with OpenAI is particularly exciting, as generative AI has the potential to transform the customer support experience. With the ability to generate responses and summarize content, Zendesk AI will be able to handle a wider range of inquiries and provide more personalized support than ever before.

As eCommerce continues to grow, companies that invest in customer support will be better positioned to succeed. With Zendesk AI, Shopify merchants and other eCommerce retailers can stay ahead of the curve and provide a superior customer support experience. To learn more about Zendesk AI, agnoStack's "Zendesk AI for Commerce" solution, and how they can benefit your business, visit their websites today.

Zendesk AI - The Future of Intelligent Customer Support