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Enhance the employee experience with Zendesk’s latest innovations

Learn how these new features take the pressure off of your EX teams and carve a path toward long-term success for your organization.

By Lilia Krauser, Staff Writer

Last updated November 14, 2023

Recent years have brought to light the important role employee experience (EX) plays in a company’s success. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, a company can increase its revenue by 50 percent by improving its employee experience. In our 2023 Employee Experience Trends Report, 79 percent of EX professionals said that EX will be a higher priority within the next 12 months.

Given the significance of EX, we’re thrilled to announce our latest batch of product innovations, designed to help internal service teams, such as IT and HR, deliver exceptional employee experiences. These new capabilities will enable seamless self-service experiences for employees and free up your internal teams to focus on more complex work. Keep reading to discover our latest EX features.

Zendesk AI for EX teams

It’s no secret that HR and IT teams are at the forefront of helping employees navigate the workplace, from pivoting between different working models (remote, in-office, and hybrid) to employee onboarding and offboarding, answering employee questions, and much more. We’re happy to share that our latest AI releases are meant to take the pressure off of IT and HR teams so they’re more productive and engaged. Zendesk AI includes:

  • Intelligent triage: This AI-powered feature detects intent, language, and sentiment to classify incoming requests, which helps teams set up the appropriate workflows and provides deeper reporting insights on top employee issues.

  • Advanced bots: Enhanced bots for messaging and email come pre-trained on an extensive database of intents and industry-specific topics, so they can deliver personalized, accurate responses to employees.

  • Intelligence in the context panel: This feature within the Zendesk Agent Workspace provides agents with insights about the employee and suggests ways to solve issues, helping to improve resolution times.

  • Macro suggestions for admins: Zendesk AI suggests new shared macros that admins can create to help agents respond faster and more effectively.

These exciting product innovations help IT and HR teams remain efficient—even when they’re spread thin—ultimately improving the employee experience.

Read more about our advanced AI capabilities here.

Conversation bots for Slack Direct Messages (DM)

Additionally, the Zendesk conversation bot can now be leveraged in Slack Direct Messages (DM) to provide better self-service. Our bot pulls information from your knowledge base to craft accurate responses and surface helpful articles, allowing you to give employees and business partners the answers they need—at any time of the day.

As a result, this feature can enable better self-service, boost productivity, and allow HR and IT teams to focus on more sensitive or complex requests.

See more details about our conversation bot for Slack DMs here.

Secure help center integrations

A common pain point for employees is needing to navigate between different channels to find basic information, which can be time-consuming and decrease productivity levels.

With our latest capabilities, Zendesk users can now make their help center a one-stop shop for all their employees’ self-service needs. For instance, you can integrate data from your HR, finance, and learning management systems into your help center to create a comprehensive employee experience portal—no more switching between systems.

While there’s no cap on services that can be integrated, any request you make to the Zendesk Help Center JWT APIs is subject to your plan’s API rate limits.

Custom ticket statuses

For many IT and HR teams, standard open and closed ticket statuses are not always best suited to describe the status of a specific ticket. This usually results in a lack of visibility for critical ticket collaborators and prevents employees from knowing the status of their own tickets.

With custom ticket statuses, Zendesk users will be able to better manage ticket workflows and create new statuses that are more meaningful to their business and end-users. These can be used in SLAs, automations, triggers, views, and side conversations.

Learn how to create a custom ticket status here.

Employee 360 app

Many HR teams need to know certain employee information, such as location or department, to provide support efficiently and effectively. The lack of integration with a human capital management system (HCM) or other employee systems can often result in longer SLAs and decreased employee satisfaction.

The Employee 360 app is delivered by our Professional Services team for a flat fee, helping Zendesk customers improve their employee experience while removing the need for custom services and integrations. With this launch, our customers can connect up to 15 fields from their HR system of record to Zendesk, and bring key employee context into every interaction.

Get more information about Zendesk Professional Services here.

Zendesk helps businesses deliver better EX

Prioritizing and enhancing EX is both an investment and a commitment for organizations seeking to achieve long-term success. Our new suite of innovations is specifically designed to address the challenges faced by IT and HR teams, as we aim to empower them with a range of features that enhance their productivity and overall experience.

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