How AI Is Transforming Customer Experience: Key Findings from Zendesk's Latest Report

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the findings from Zendesk’s 7th Annual CX Trends Report, which reveals AI’s major impact on customer experience, a rise in CX tickets, and how consumers can now identify companies using AI, along with the challenges of shadow AI and security.

Highlights

00:06 — I want to talk about some findings from the seventh annual Zendesk CX Trends Report. A big issue was the increasing use of AI and the ways in which both businesses are recognizing the significance of using AI, and interestingly, how their customers can now tell more and more who’s using AI and who isn’t.

00:39 — We could say that AI is revolutionizing the CX industry. In fact, 70% of the approximately 12,000 people who responded to this survey said that because of what’s going on in CX, including AI and other things, they’re seeing more of a transformation across the CX landscape than they have over the past 50 years. Over the last couple of years, they said CX tickets have gone up 60%.

01:30 — Another finding, what I’m calling the AI gap, said that 70% of consumers report that they’re now able to tell when they’re looking online which of these companies is using AI or not.

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02:29 — This incidence of shadow AI is coming up, 250% year over year. There’s a lot of businesses that are eager to deploy AI and use it more aggressively now, whether or not they are able to get the funding going through regular channels or the corporate rollout. Who’s going to enact right governance? This rise of shadow AI is troubling.

03:22 — The fact that so many companies using CX now say that the impact of AI is the biggest trendsetter in the past 50 years, plus this notion of “get in there early,” the early adopters are seeing big, big benefits in ROI, are pointing to a robust future here for AI in the CX world.