Earlier this week, Zendesk announced that it is acquiring Tymeshift to transform contact centers with AI-powered workforce management capabilities. More than 90% of customers already use AI for various purposes within the Zendesk ecosystem, ensuring they are providing the highest levels of service experience through their contact centers. Much like the customers who think highly of AI-assisted customer experience, contact center agents also have a strong inclination toward using AI for fulfilling their tasks. For call center managers, adding Tymeshift to the Zendesk suite could mean they are closely monitoring agent performance and their satisfaction levels without interruptions using AI. We spoke to Zendesk’s Senior Vice President (Asia), Yew Hwee Ng, to understand how AI-assisted WFM capabilities would remove the barriers in contact center operations and improve integration with the existing HR Technology stack for better results.
This is what Yew Hwee had to say to our readers.
You are taking AI-assisted CX productivity to great heights with this new development. Could you please tell us how the new AI capabilities would allow you to meet the ever-growing demands in the customer service industry?
The customer service industry is complex and shouldering growing workloads. Zendesk’s acquisition of Tymeshift helps organizations streamline operations and optimize staffing in areas of scheduling, forecasting, and reporting. By being able to track agent activity, productivity, and efficiency in real time, organizations have greater visibility over matrices that determine business successes and help them make informed business decisions.
The use of AI could mean a complete restructuring of the customer contact centers by removing activities that were otherwise handled by human agents.
What would an AI-powered contact center look like in the near future with the integration of Zendesk + Tymeshift?
The use of AI is meant to complement the human workforce, allowing them to be more consistent, better understand customers and glean actionable insights. Customers who implement Tymeshift can now track agent activity, productivity, and efficiency in real time. Visibility into agent activity and automatic tracking in Zendesk will now allow support teams to save valuable time previously spent on manual workforce management tasks by automatically creating schedules, forecasts, and real-time reports. This eliminates significant amounts of manual workload, thus freeing up time for agents and admins to work on more meaningful tasks.
What is Zendesk’s AI roadmap for drilling/leveraging predictive intelligence and data analytics reporting for the CX industry?
How are you planning to take Tymeshift’s offerings to new markets?
Acquiring Tymeshift is a step in Zendesk’s journey to a new era of Intelligent CX.
We are tapping into a new growth market in the workforce management space and are looking into combining the predictive capabilities of Tymeshift with Zendesk’s existing AI capabilities, bringing it to greater heights in terms of AI-assisted CX productivity. We will continue to strengthen our support for customers through automated agent scheduling and instant reaction to customer inquiry spikes, ultimately making businesses more productive.
Thank you, Yew! That was fun and we hope to see you back on HR Tech Series soon.
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
Yew Hwee Ng is the SVP, Asia at Zendesk.