Last week, Zendesk announced an agreement to acquire Ultimate, a customer service automation company.
The CRM stalwart expects to complete the deal within the next four weeks and – soon after – "more deeply" embed the AI platform beyond its existing “one-click” integration.
In doing so, Zendesk may help customers get going with conversational AI faster with a new library of pre-built bot workflows.
Yet, Ultimate also enables businesses to better design, build, and optimize their own bot flows by triggering new actions and leveraging upgraded analytics.
Those new actions include automated customer replies, tags, data enrichment, ticket closings, and routings.
Then, with upgraded analytics, Zendesk customers may:
- See which tickets the business has answered and understand.
- Filter tickets by language, resolution, intent, or another specific label.
- View the top customer intents across the business.
- Isolate possible areas of improvement with visualizations.
As such, Zendesk can quickly make several short-term benefits available to its customers. However, the move also seems part of a longer-term play.
After all, as Tom Eggemeier, CEO of Zendesk, stated: "AI is the future of CX, and the next generation of AI agents are not just a tool, but a necessary and fundamental shift in how businesses will engage with their customers.
With Ultimate, we will help our customers set a new standard.
To set that standard, Zendesk may leverage Ultimate’s tech – and its 150 ambitious "Ultimates" – to advance its portfolio in two other distinct ways:
- To power new, industry-specific conversations and flows
- To pull together its swelling portfolio and enable new capabilities
Below is a closer look at these points and an inspection of what they may mean for Zendesk’s future.
Zendesk May Drive Industry-Specific Innovation Forwards
With its Ultimate acquisition, Zendesk welcomes a host of AI experts skilled in developing customized bots that perform industry-specific tasks.
By bringing them into the fold, Zendesk can begin to ask – across our deep history in the contact center – what cross-office, customized workflows does every business need within a specific sector? Then, they may innovate and make those available out-of-the-box.
Ultimate already does this by utilizing API integrations, large language models (LLMs), and various other forms of AI to offer a library of oven-ready, industry-specific bot flows.
For instance, in retail, Ultimate offers a bot that recognizes when a customer requests an update on their order. It then requests an order number, calls into the back-end system, uncovers the status, and sends a fluid response to personalize the service experience.
Yet, this is only one example within a library that crosses many more industries to automate lots of service conversations and processes.
Consider financial services. There, Ultimate offers pre-built flows to support customers in canceling transfers, activating cards, and requesting information about the status of a transfer.
However, that’s only one example of many, with Ultimate also offering flows across sectors such as eCommerce, entertainment, travel, telcos, utilities, and more.
Within each, Ultimate takes an adaptive approach across use cases – leveraging different AI technologies to generate the best results instead of following a one-size-fits-all strategy.
