Customer service conversations are on the rise, and AI helps to scale the ability to respond.
Customer service and sales software company Zendesk has announced its acquisition of AI-powered support solution Cleverly.ai.
The acquisition aims at further boosting Zendesk’s agent and admin productivity tools, adding to such offerings as Zendesk macro suggestions (based on ticket context in order to increase agency efficiency), as well as Answer Bot (a chatbot which can answer routine questions or escalate to a live agent) and Content Cues (which identifies content to be refreshed based on customer service cases).
In addition to this acquisition, Zendesk has also released a number of new customer service capabilities including:
- Performance reports on bot-based automation strategies, e.g. number of conversations escalated to agents;
- Social workflow automation to improve response times and case resolution;
- Pre-built integrations with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Monday.com.
Why we care. Conversation volume has gone up more than 20 percent year-over-year, according to Zendesk’s updated survey. With supply chain problems and ongoing uncertainty about how the pandemic will resolve, the volume of contacts from customers is likely to continue to climb.
And to remain competitive in most industries, marketers will have to plan to meet these inquiries at scale, and to have a good data infrastructure to support all the conversations with real-time insights into customer behavior.
Read next: To improve customer experience, it’s a matter of voice.
The post Zendesk acquires Cleverly.ai appeared first on MarTech.
MarTechAbout The Author
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
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