Zendesk fuses AI into customer services with Amazon Connect integration

Zendesk has announced integration that allows Zendesk Support and Amazon Connect customers to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, courtesy of AWS.

The new services are designed to improve contact centre agent efficiency, while reducing the time that end users spend interacting with customer service.

According to the Zendesk Benchmark Report, AI-enabled teams see 21 percent faster resolution times while handling about six times the volume of requests compared to their peers.

Companies using the enhanced connector in contact centres can benefit from AWS' AI and machine learning services such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend.

This allows companies to provide a more proactive, anticipatory customer experience in which agents are more efficient in anticipating and solving customer issues, as well as helping businesses to address routine problems and questions through intelligently automated self-service.

 "We are excited to continue our work with AWS to help companies provide some of the best proactive contact centre experiences for their customers," says Zendesk's president of products, Adrian McDermot.

"By tapping into AI and machine learning, businesses can easily create an intelligent contact centre customer service experience that allows businesses not only to resolve questions and issues more quickly and efficiently, but also in some cases, even eliminating the need for their customers to wait to speak with an agent at all.

AWS Amazon Connect general manager Pasquale DeMaio says, "The updated connector for Amazon Connect and Zendesk Support is designed to offer the next generation of customer service by empowering businesses to anticipate and intelligently address their customer needs in real-time using AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning services.

"We look forward to delighting customers around the globe with this integrated customer service solution in 2020.

The enhanced Zendesk connector for Amazon Connect will be available as a pre-integrated solution starting in late January 2020. It will be deployed directly and through trusted partners globally.

The Zendesk and AWS Connect integration is the latest in a series of integrations between Zendesk and AWS.

In June 2019, Zendesk announced the Zendesk Events Connector for Amazon EventBridge. These connectors are part of a larger effort for Zendesk's open and flexible CRM platform, Sunshine, to further accelerate the ability for companies to free customer data and allow developers to build out functionality with the tools they prefer – entirely on open standards with the security, scalability, and reliability of AWS at its core.