In Part 1, we looked at the true cost of a typical Zendesk agent (around $45,000/year) in the US or UK. We also looked at the cost of Zendesk’s Advanced AI (around $0.31/hour/agent).

With these numbers to hand, we can break down the best features of Advanced AI and see if they save us more or less than that every hour.

Time-saving Features

Zendesk lists the eight features of Advanced AI as follows

• Intelligent triage
• Intelligence in the context panel
• Generative AI for agents
• AI-powered intents for bots
• Macro suggestions for admins
• Autoreply and internal note trigger actions
• Generative AI for help center
• Generative AI for voice

The last feature on the list is actually the one I want to focus on first, as it’s so obviously powerful.

Generative AI for Voice

This tool automatically listens through a call recording (as soon as the call is finished) and generates a call summary as an internal note. This saves your agent time writing up the note but also saves other agents time skimming through the call if they come to the ticket later when no note was manually written.

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Potential savings

Typical wrap up times are between 15 and 60 seconds. We’ll assume a wrap-up time of 40 seconds for the sake of our numbers.

In my experience, the bulk of call wrap-up time is spent writing up the call summary, so let’s assign 30 seconds to this task.

Now, here’s where the magic happens. Zendesk Advanced AI can write up that call summary in zero seconds, as it has in the example above. This saves our agent 30 seconds per call, or 2.5 minutes per hour, at five calls an hour.

Using our same typical numbers as before, that’s a saving of $0.98/hour right off the bat ($0.39 typical agent cost per minute * 2.5 minutes saved).

Let’s see where else Advanced AI can save us not just time and money, but also your agents’ mental capacity.

Generative AI for Agents

Generative AI helps your agents to write ticket responses more quickly and to tune up their tone of voice where required.

Writing a well thought out response can easily take a few minutes. Indeed, in our example, we’ve put the time taken to respond to a ticket as three minutes. That includes time taken to read and understand the ticket, plus some time to tag the ticket. But a good chunk of that time, at least half, is taken actually drafting a response (when a macro isn’t used).

With an agent answering five tickets per hour, let’s assume that two of those can be answered by macros straight away, leaving three responses that need drafting at 1.5 minutes each.

Imagine a ticket that requires a thought out response like:

Hi Jude,

Thank you for getting in touch about your order.

I’m afraid the window to return your item for a refund has lapsed now.

I realize this may be disappointing for you, so as a gesture of goodwill I’d like to offer you 20% off your next order with us.

Let me know if that would be satisfactory for you.

With Generative AI for Agents, your agents can skip the small talk and get right down to the point, all without upsetting your valuable customers.

Start by writing the key points for the AI to generate from:

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Click the Generative AI button, then Expand

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You now have something like this. Expanded, but still not quite there.

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Hit the Generative AI button again, and then “Make more friendly”

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Et voila! In no more than 15 seconds, we’ve gone from a blank canvas to a ready-to-send AI-assisted response.

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Potential Savings

Let’s assume it takes another five seconds to scan the response for mistakes, making the total time 20 seconds, rather than 1.5 minutes.

Using our typical numbers of 3 manually-drafted ticket responses per hour, that reduces the time to respond from 4.5 minutes to just 1 minute!

At $0.39 per minute for your agent’s valuable time, that’s a saving of $1.37 every hour that you use Advanced AI’s Generative AI for Agents feature.

Thoughts on cost-saving benefit of Advanced AI

Obvious savings

With these two features alone, a typical CS team will be saving $2.04 per hour per agent. ($1.37 saving from Generative AI for Agents + $0.98 saving from Generative AI for Voice minus $0.31 for the extra cost of turning on Advanced AI).

That’s a saving of almost $4,000 per year per agent, from just two of Advanced AI’s features.

Hidden Savings and Stumbling Blocks

There are other potential savings too, such as an increase in customer lifetime value due to higher customer satisfaction from quicker response times.

On the other hand, used poorly, an Advanced AI could cost you. For example, agents making use of Generative AI to draft ticket responses but not checking the AI-generated text properly could result in very unhappy customers indeed.

Further Considerations

It’s also worth noting that Advanced AI is only designed for B2C industries. If you’re running a B2B business, Zendesk may not even allow you to try out the features!

Furthermore, if your hourly agent rate is significantly lower than in the UK or US, if your contact center is based in India or the Philippines, for example, then although the time saved by Advanced AI will be the same, the money saved will be reduced. So it’s imperative that you punch your own numbers into these calculations and see how they turn out for you.

Conclusion

As with all new AI tools, they work best to support humans, not to replace them. It’s imperative that this principle is understood right from your head of customer service down to your weekend and evening shift agents. Trying to cut too many corners by using AI won’t end well!

Overall, however, the savings and benefits of using Advanced AI are clear. Your agents can have more time to answer the trickier tickets by handing over the heavy lifting of simple (and frankly often boring) tickets to AI, your customers can receive quicker and more accurate responses and you can save your bottom line thousands of dollars every year.

The fact that these outcomes are now available to us and ultimately save us money too is a real win - and is exactly what AI should be doing for businesses around the world.