AI-Driven Resolution: Transforming Customer and Employee Service

How is AI fundamentally transforming customer and employee service? 

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At the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed, Collaboration Track opener, Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering, and AI at Zendesk, joins host Melody Brue for a look into the future of service in the age of intelligence.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹AI's Rapid Evolution in Service: Explore the accelerated pace of AI adoption and its profound impact on service industries, transforming the very nature of customer and employee interactions.

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🔹From AI Assistance to Problem-Solving Solutions: Understand the critical inflection point where AI will evolve from a simple tool for assistance into a powerful, autonomous solution capable of complex problem-solving.

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🔹Human-AI Synergy for Issue Resolution: Discover the indispensable, synergistic relationship between humans and AI, highlighting how their collaboration leads to more effective and efficient issue resolution.

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🔹Zendesk's AI-Powered Resolution Platform: Discover the role of Zendesk's innovative AI-powered Resolution Platform in enabling adaptable automation tailored to specific customer needs and setting new industry standards for service excellence.

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Learn more at Zendesk.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

Melody Brue: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed. I am thrilled to be joined today by Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering, and AI at Zendesk for the collaboration track opening keynote on transforming customer and employee service through AI. Shashi, thank you so much for joining us.

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Shashi Upadhyay: Thank you for having me here.

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Melody Brue: So, just a year ago, many organizations were still cautiously experimenting with AI, and today AI is no longer a novelty. It's become a critical force reshaping how businesses serve both customers and employees. And AI is evolving from simple assistance to intelligent problem-solving. So, let's dive right in. What are the biggest challenges you've seen recently in how AI is used in customer and employee services?

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Shashi Upadhyay: No, you're absolutely right. This is probably the biggest change we have seen in humanity's history since industrial revolution and how work is going to get done. And AI has gone from being at the periphery of the discussions we're having, and as a helper, to being at the very center of the customer and employee service discourse. Instead of starting with human agents, for example, companies are now starting to ask the question: What if the primary solver, the primary way to solve service problems, are actually going to be AI agents? And only when that fails is it going to go to human agents. And that is a massive shift, because you have to go in and change their data workflow, you have to go and change the entire reporting. You have to go in and change everything that you... Kind of rethink from the beginning everything you've been doing all along the way.

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Companies that have embraced this approach are seeing very high automation rates. 80 plus percent of service cases can now be solved by AI. From 10 to 20%, just like six months ago. So the pace of change has been extremely rapid. And in this new world, humans will still have a role, but now they're freed up to work on the hardest problems and to work on the situations that are most complex and when the user, the customer, needs the most empathy. So this is a really big change because it's not an easy change. It requires an entire transformation of the organization.

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Melody Brue: Yeah, I love that. There is a lot of fear around that people are going to lose jobs and all of that, and the reality is there may be some of that, but freeing people up to do the more meaningful work is really so nice. And so I'd love to hear from you, what makes Zendesk's AI approach fundamentally different from other AI applications and customer service?

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Shashi Upadhyay: That's a really good question. So, for us, we start with the user who has a problem. When someone calls in with a support case or with a ticket, they're already in a not great frame of mind. They have a problem, they need it solved. And what do they care about? They care that the problem is solved quickly. They care that it's solved correctly, and they care that they're treated courteously. Those are the three things they're looking for. So we have centered everything we're doing, both for the humans and for AI agents, around those three goals. How can we solve the problem quickly? How can we solve it accurately, and how can the end user have the best possible experience? And because we focus exclusively on service, and we're not trying to sell something else, we're not attached to some other platform. We believe we can optimize our approach to the highest level possible for each company that we work with.

And focusing on service for us means being singularly obsessed about the type of problems that customers have, how to resolve them quickly and at the lowest cost possible for you. 

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Now we have over a hundred thousand customers, which means we are globally present. We are present across every vertical. So we have a ton of expertise across use cases, across verticals, and across how to get customers the best outcomes possible. All of those lessons are being brought toward AI and humans working together. So that's really what separates Zendesk from everyone else is the obsession with service. And it's the obsession with those three goals: solve accurately, solve quickly, and provide the best experience possible while doing so.

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Melody Brue: And so, while you're doing that, I mean, I mentioned a little bit that it really allows humans to be good at what they're really good at and kind of take away some of that more tedious work, the work that they don't actually want to do. How do you see AI enhancing the capabilities of human agents rather than replacing them?

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Shashi Upadhyay: Absolutely. So the job of  human agents on the flip side of an upset customer is a human agent who has to absorb all that negativity, shall we say, right? And if you ask yourself what frustrates the consumer in the end, it's that they had a long time to wait. That when they call an agent, the agent actually doesn't know anything about the background. They have to go through a whole data entry process, and then when the agent is not able to solve it, passes it to another agent, they have to restart from the beginning. So it's not unusual for a typical customer service conversation to be, if you're having a live conversation, it can easily go into 20, 30 minutes. And if you're trying to solve it over email or text, it can go into days or weeks. So, for us, it's all about how do we make that agent as knowledgeable as they can be and take away all their drudgery.

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So drudgery is pulling data from different systems. Drudgery is drafting a form response that they could have. It could have been generated by an AI. Drudgery is repeating the same set of tasks over and over again. So our vision of our co-pilot is to take away the drudgery so that the agent can focus on providing the best possible experience to the end customer, and they can focus their attention on solving the hardest problems, problems that go outside of what could be automated. So we are kind of focusing on those two things at the moment. And, over time, we expect that even these co-pilots will become more and more intelligent. The co-pilots themselves will learn from what humans are doing and start to take on more and more of these tasks so that even the lowest LTV customer, the lowest lifetime value customer, can call and get a live agent when they have a very hard problem.

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Melody Brue: Do you see with AI that the things that we're optimizing for in customer service might change a little bit? Like we've always optimized for time to resolution and, with AI allowing for humans to really get into those more meaningful conversations where people can really feel heard and their problems can be solved, do you see those things that people are optimizing for changing at all over time?

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Shashi Upadhyay: Absolutely. So, before one can have meaningful conversations, you have to solve the problem. So I think too often, and there's been kind of a long thread of conversations over the years about how support teams need to extend themselves and go into cross-sell, upsell and other ways of generating revenue, but the basics have to be in place. And the basics that have to be in place is: I, as a consumer, should be able to call a company or reach out to a company anytime of day, can depend on if it's a holiday, if it's late at night, and get a resolution as quickly as possible. And what's more, over time, what we're going to see have happened is that users are not even reaching out to companies anymore. They're going to tell their co-pilot, their AI agent, to go deal with these problems. So that's the world that we're moving to. 

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So the only time when you have the human-to-human interaction is when all else has failed.

When you have asked your agent to call the company agent and the problem didn't get solved, or you interacted with the AI agent of the company and the problem didn't get solved. So by the time you're reaching out and reaching a human, you are already in the hardest kind of problem category, so to speak. So, what we see ourselves as doing at the moment is to ensure that everything that can be solved very quickly, live, in the middle of the night, on a weekend, all of that is done. So we expand the time and the quality of resolutions that people can get as reliably as possible and do so very quickly. And that's what AI agents do very well.

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Then there's a question of the experience that the consumer has with the human agent. And I think that is so much easier to do when the human agent is not harassed by a bunch of small stuff, like responding to a whole bunch of small stuff all day. So I think some of it would just happen naturally as a consequence of this automation. Some of this will just happen naturally because now they have more time. It's like a doctor who is now freed up because they don't have to do all that paperwork so they can actually sit and listen to the patient and solve their problem. So I really believe, we really believe, this is going to be a massive change and dramatically improve the quality of experience that consumers have with companies.

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Melody Brue: And we've talked a lot about the experience for the customer, and, of course, that's really important, but this also really affects the experience of the human agents. And historically, that's been a problem, but there's a lot of turnover in these contact centers that it can be a grueling job. So, talk to me a little bit about how this really helps for turnover for companies, for giving them the ability to manage their workforce a little bit better with these AI agents, who don't get tired, they don't need days off, they don't get sick. How does that help their workforce?

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Shashi Upadhyay: Great. Really good question. So I think we've all had the experience of where we've called in, and we wanted a problem solved quickly, and it just wasn't getting done. So, a lot of that frustration, whether expressed or not expressed, passes on to these agents. These are the toughest jobs in the industry. These are not jobs that people come out of college saying, "This is what I really want to go do." And it requires a very special kind of person to do them day in and day out. There's a lot of burnout in the industry. There's a lot of turnover. Many people see these jobs as a road to something else. They'll go into customer success or, over time, into sales and other things which are even more lucrative. So, making the experience of these agents better is a massive priority for us and for the companies because, at the end of the day, people don't remember the best experience they had. They always remember the worst experience they had.

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Melody Brue: Yes.

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Shashi Upadhyay: That's what they associate a brand with. And then, these days, they'll take that experience and then go share it on TikTok or social media or whatever. So, it's not like it's isolated. So, if you want to optimize for the best experience people have and make sure that the worst is not terrible, then we have to start with the agents, because they're human beings too, and they have good days and bad days. So taking away the drudgery, taking away the repetitive tasks, taking away the stuff that makes their life not... The job's not enjoyable. I think that's where it's at. A lot of people who go into these roles genuinely like people and they like to serve people. That's why they took the role. So freeing them up to serve them in a way that's not rushed. I mean, you've been in this industry. For a long time, so much of the stuff is managed by how many calls you take in a day. If you're managed by how many calls you take in a day, on the other side of it is a rushed consumer, and you don't feel that great about having rushed them through.

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Melody Brue: Right.

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Shashi Upadhyay: So maybe we can give people all the time they need to solve the problem, because all the boring drudgery stuff has been taken over by AI agents. And so the problems that you're dealing with genuinely require intellect, they require empathy, they require listening, they require a good conversation. And that could make the job a lot more fulfilling, because you're leaving behind someone who's very happy about the experience they had with you.

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Melody Brue: And certainly less turnover means more money for the company. Because those are expensive things. That kind of turnover can be very expensive for companies, right?

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Shashi Upadhyay: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I don't think anybody sets these things up saying, "This is all about money and we're just going to make our customers have a bad experience." I mean, we have to keep improving CSAT because we all know if you have a good CSAT, then you have good Net Promoter Score. If you have good Net Promoter Score, you have better lifetime value. I think that the equation is well understood, but service organizations are always under cost pressure. This is not a new thing. It's always been like this.

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Melody Brue: Yeah.

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Shashi Upadhyay: And because they're always under cost pressure, there's a great way to take that pressure off today, which is to use AI agents to do a bulk of the work and to do it in a way where you can simultaneously improve all these metrics. See, that's actually the beauty of this. It can simultaneously increase the coverage time. You can increase CSAT. You can increase average handling time. AI agents can just do the job right away. They don't have to go have lunch breaks, this, that or the other. It takes time and testing to improve all of these things and then leave the hardest problem for the human agents to come back and solve.

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Melody Brue: So Shashi, if you had one bold prediction of where you see the biggest change in this industry over the next five years, what would it be?

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Shashi Upadhyay: I think the biggest change will be a bit of a back to the future, which is, as a user, you'll be able to get a live human agent whenever you want. And the reason is because you'll have so much confidence in the AI that you'll actually prefer a solution from them first. And only when, in those very exceptional cases, can you not solve the problem, you'll go talk to a human agent, and you'll no longer have this, like you may submit a form, and you wait for three days to get a response kind of thing anymore. So, I actually think we're entering the golden era of service, where anytime you have a problem, it'll either get solved very, very quickly by an AI agent, or you'll get a live human agent on the other side of it, and you'll have that solved very quickly now by a human agent. So that's my bold prediction. There are many other predictions we can make, but I look forward to that time.

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Melody Brue: Well, that's awesome and that's a great way to wrap this up. So, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you all for watching. For this collaboration track opening keynote at the Six Five Summit, stay connected with us on social and explore more conversations at sixfivemedia.com/summit. On behalf of the Six Five Media, thanks for joining us.

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Shashi Upadhyay: Thank you very much, and thank you for having me.

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Melody Brue: Thank you.

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