Getting started with Zendesk Chatbot

If you’re looking for ways to scale your customer service operation, with thousands of tickets and answers, you probably want to look into integrating a Conversational AI solution with your ticketing tool (like Zendesk). Conversational AI is the next generation of “Chatbots”. While both chatbots and Conversational AI serve the same purpose (offering an automated conversational experience to your customers), Chatbots follow a pre-defined flow, which often leads to a robotic feeling. Conversational AI, on the other hand - follows the “user-intent”, and uses AI to understand the meaning of the user’s request, and navigating the conversation.

Customers want to get answers as fast as they can, with minimum efforts. Therefore, even if you have a well maintained help-center set-up with your Zendesk, customers will still reach out to you, asking basic questions like “What’s my shipping status”. The answer usually needs to be tailored to your customer-specific needs. 

Which Zendesk Chatbot?

While there are many “Zendesk chatbot” vendors, you have to pay attention to see if it really fits your business needs. If you want to set up a Zendesk Chatbot, you’ll want a solution that is based on AI, which understands what the customers are asking, and can produce a personalized answer, tuned to customer needs -  Based on the context, user preferences, and sentiment analysis. Zendesk was designed to support that kind of interaction, and you should leverage that to offer a better experience for your customers.

Plantt offers out-of-the-box integration for Zendesk Chat. While chatbots are often costly and require spending months on integration, our idea behind Plantt was to create something simple, with the same enterprise-level AI - yet super easy to use, and takes minutes to install.

Zendesk AI Chatbot: Implementation

When it comes to conversational experiences and messaging with your customers, Zendesk as a few products and add-ons that can help manage these conversations across different platforms.

• Zendesk Chat: Zendesk Chat lets visitors on your website live chat with your agents. As it turns out if your purpose is to automate conversations in this platform, be sure to have an Enterprise license for Zendesk Chat. Lower plans for Zendesk Chat does not include the Chat Conversation API, which is needed to set up your automation.
• Zendesk Support: Another affordable option is to use Plantt Chat Widget which integrates directly with Zendesk Support. With this integration, visitors on your website or mobile app can use Plantt to get human-like answers. If the Conversational AI model fails to understand the user, then a new ticket will be created on your Zendesk Support, and the conversation history will be attached to the ticket for context. When your agents leave comments on your tickets, they will go back to the customers.
  Many of our customers prefer taking this strategy, as this approach aligned with the “Automation-first” approach instead of a Live Chat approach.
• Sunshine Conversations: Sunshine Conversations lets you unify messages from every channel into a single conversation (“Omnichannel”), and integrates directly with Zendesk Support. If you take an omnichannel approach to serve your customers, this is probably the most effective solution for you. Plantt integrates directly with Sunshine Conversations, so you can create an automated experience in minutes.
• Social Messaging Add-on: Zendesk has a “Social Messaging” add-on which integrates Zendesk Support with messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. While this add-on lets your agents text with your customers on the messaging platforms, please note that you can not enable automation on these channels. The reason is that Zendesk does not offer an API to read and send messages in these channels. 

How Plantt can help?

A Zendesk Chatbot can be a powerful enhancement to your customer support environment if done the right way. Our recommendation is to use Conversational AI to ensure your customers get a flawless experience and really relieves the pressure on your customer support reps.

Plantt makes it super easy to automate conversations on Zendesk. It connects with your Zendesk and automatically tailors a Conversational AI model that fits your business. The fun part about it is that it does the hard work for you. Based on your Zendesk tickets analysis, Plantt will automatically identify repetitive inquires that can be automated seamlessly. 

To setup your first conversational experience, signup for Plantt here.