Zendesk acquires Cleverly.ai

Customer service and sales software company Zendesk has announced its acquisition of AI-powered support solution Cleverly.ai.

The acquisition aims at further boosting Zendesk’s agent and admin productivity tools, adding to such offerings as Zendesk macro suggestions (based on ticket context in order to increase agency efficiency), as well as Answer Bot (a chatbot which can answer routine questions or escalate to a live agent) and Content Cues (which identifies content to be refreshed based on customer service cases).

In addition to this acquisition, Zendesk has also released a number of new customer service capabilities including:

• Performance reports on bot-based automation strategies, e.g. number of conversations escalated to agents;
• Social workflow automation to improve response times and case resolution;
• Pre-built integrations with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Monday.com.

Why we care. Conversation volume has gone up more than 20 percent year-over-year, according to Zendesk’s updated survey. With supply chain problems and ongoing uncertainty about how the pandemic will resolve, the volume of contacts from customers is likely to continue to climb. 

And to remain competitive in most industries, marketers will have to plan to meet these inquiries at scale, and to have a good data infrastructure to support all the conversations with real-time insights into customer behavior.

Dig deeper: To improve customer experience, it’s a matter of voice.