At its Relate event last month, Zendesk made its vision clear: resolution is the only outcome that matters.
Indeed, facilitating resolutions has become its North Star.
So, everything it does – in terms of software, data, workflows, and AI – is going to be in service of resolutions.
Yet, that mission doesn’t start and end with customer resolutions; it includes employee resolutions, too.
This idea preceded the announcement of the Zendesk Employee Service Suite.
The announcement slipped under the radar amongst the myriad of announcements at Zendesk Relate, but it’s significant.
After all, it does more than just bundle the employee-focused support tools already in Zendesk, like its Agent Copilot, Custom Objects, and Help Center.
Indeed, it introduces two significant new capabilities: Service Catalog and Tasks & Approvals. (More on these later!).
By bringing this all together, Zendesk provides a new place for service teams to receive “rapid resolutions” to their HR- and IT-related queries.
AI agents play a role here. Indeed, the Zendesk Employee Service Suite integrates with human capital management (HCM) and IT service management (ITSM) systems.
From there, the AI agents actively navigate these systems to provide answers to a wide range of employee inquiries.
That’s an impressive feature and one that Zendesk may strengthen over time by bringing its workforce management (WFM) technology into the fold.
Yet, for now, let’s take a closer look at the other two significant new capabilities teased earlier.
The Service Catalog: An Integrated Way to Show Employee Services
The Service Catalog allows employers to showcase a list of services internal teams offer to wider employees.
Take IT teams, for example. They could offer a range of services such as laptop replacements, licenses, and VPN access as services to employees.
As such, employees can explore available services via Zendesk, access related information, and submit requests directly through the Help Center when needed.
This functionality is enabled by a new Help Center interface for service creation, an updated UI for end-user browsing, and an integration with Agent Workspace using lookup fields for service requests.
The Tasks and Approvals Feature: Coming to a Workplace Near You
When a live agent requests extra leave, a new device, or something similar, there’s often a multi-step approval process supervisors must follow.
The Tasks and Approvals feature will help define the steps that a human supervisor and/or AI agent can follow to resolve the employee service ticket.
Businesses can fully automate such approvals or leave some of the steps for supervisors as part of an orchestrated workflow.
Live agents can make requests – giving additional context – via the new Approvals Context Panel.
The Help Center manages approvals through a dedicated Approval Requests tab in a user’s profile. This tab provides a clear overview of ticket details and the original agent’s description.
Requests can be either approved or denied, with the option for the supervisor or AI agent to include a reason for the decision.
More Relate Highlights
The bigger announcements and highlights of the Relate event included the debut of its new CCaaS platform.
The unveiling of the “Zendesk for Contact Center” offering follows last month’s acquisition of Local Measure, a close contact center partner of AWS.
Essentially, the platform launch will mark a relaunch of “Local Measure Engage”, but embedded inside the Zendesk environment.
In a press release, Zendesk stated its intention to “redefine the contact center landscape,” though not necessarily through enhanced capabilities, since Local Measure largely mirrors Amazon Connect’s features, albeit in a more streamlined package.
Instead, Zendesk’s approach will focus on converging the customer service stack in the interest of enhancing resolutions.
On that note, Zendesk also used the Relate event to Introduce the Zendesk Resolution Platform, which will serve as a new hub for Agentic AI.
Designed as a central hub for AI agents, this platform enables AI agents to reason, learn, and evolve, gradually automating more and more customer interactions.
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