Workforce Management Featured Article
Zendesk Announces New Solutions for Call Center Triage
Triage, the concept of making snap decisions about which issue in a complex morass requires action most urgently, isn’t just for healthcare. Contact centers are required to engage in triage regularly to prioritize incoming or outbound customer contacts to help people with the most urgent needs. A person asking a random question about their balance, for example, would show up lower in the priority list than a person who can’t access their account to make a payment.
In years past, call center triage was done by human workers, who evaluated the data they had available to try and make the best decision possible. Increasingly, this call center triage is being done by artificial intelligence platforms that naturally have access to more data and faster processing speeds.
Zendesk introduced Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, new AI solutions designed to help businesses triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale. By democratizing access to these solutions, companies are better equipped to understand intent and sentiment through account-specific, data-driven models that are customized for individual use cases and drive faster resolutions.
Zendesk notes that Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist are the next steps in Zendesk’s vision to create accessible CX AI for companies of all sizes. The technology uses proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and applies a vertical lens. This creates models that can be customized to each business capable of identifying the intent, language and sentiment of each customer interaction.
The solutions apply machine learning to create more personalized and informed interactions to better serve customers. For example, specific inquiries, such as, "I'm having problems with payment," can be automatically sent to an agent who is equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution. On the other hand, inquiries that include language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way will indicate a highly negative sentiment and can be routed to the top of the queue for immediate response – or even escalation.
“With this technology, we’re delivering AI tools that can be set up in under a minute to streamline business operations without needing dedicated developers or an expensive implementation,” said Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer of Zendesk. “Our approach is designed to take the burden off customer experience teams through pre-trained machine learning tools that do more, faster and with less guesswork involved. These models come ready to use instantly, and continue to learn over time and become customized to each company’s operations by continuously incorporating feedback.”
Edited by Erik Linask
