Customer service is becoming synonymous with AI. By 2023, Gartner predicts that over 50% of medium to large enterprises will be leveraging customer service AI of some form. Help desk platforms like Zendesk and Jira are rapidly incorporating AI and automation – transforming how companies provide technical support and scale operations.
But capabilities vary greatly between solutions. As an AI expert with over 10 years of experience developing and implementing customer service bots and agents, I‘ve analyzed Zendesk and Jira head-to-head to compare key elements of their automation functionalities.
Current Customer Service AI Landscape
Before evaluating Zendesk vs Jira specifically, it helps set the stage to understand the state of customer service AI industry-wide.
Up to 33% Cost Savings Driven by AI
AI-powered customer service drives significant cost efficiencies for companies. According to Juniper Research, AI agents can realize up to 33% cost savings from increased productivity and reduced call volumes.
Forrester also found that AI solutions lead to 50% faster resolution of routine requests and 35% containment of service desk costs.
AI-powered agents helping curb rising customer support costs (Source: Juniper Research)
This directly improves customer satisfaction metrics as well since requests can be handled faster.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Data shows that over 50% of customers expect their issues to be resolved on first contact, with 64% more likely to return after a single good experience. AI enables consistently quick and correct resolutions – crucial for retention and loyalty.
In fact, 80% of customers feel the majority of their issues can be solved through automation rather than talking to agents. AI fills this need perfectly by handling high volume repetitive inquiries.
Current AI Appetite is High
With clear benefits around operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, AI adoption in customer service is accelerating:
- 75% of support leaders say AI will significantly transform their contact centers within 3 years
- 89% of businesses believe AI can deliver as good or better performance than humans
- Over 50% of support teams want to implement a digital workforce including bots
50% of teams have already adopted AI, while 41% are in the process (Source: Salesforce)
Already, chatbots resolve up to 80% of routine customer inquiries completely autonomously through natural language dialogues.
As AI capabilities grow more advanced integrating capabilities like optical character recognition, intent analysis and speech analytics, machines will handle even complex issues reliably.
This sets the stage for evaluating help desk platforms like Zendesk and Jira leading the way on customer service AI innovation.
Comparing AI & Automation: Zendesk vs Jira
Both Zendesk and Jira have baked automation capabilities natively into their platforms. Additionally, they provide separate AI solutions called Zendesk Sunshine and Jira Service Management that teams can implement for expanded intelligent functionality.
Let‘s analyze how they compare from both out-of-the-box automation to extended AI offerings.
Workflow Automation
Basic ticket assignment rules and routing workflows are readily available in both tools. You can automatically:
- Assign tickets based on type, priority, keyword, etc
- Route groups of tickets to agents with specialized skills
- Send canned responses to common requests
- Escalate stagnant tickets
- Notify assignees of updates
These simple conditional rules require no coding to set up.
Zendesk makes it a little easier through their intuitive drag and drop workflow builder. Predefined templates help teams get started faster.
Jira offers more advanced options given its native business process modeling capabilities. This includes building Jira Service Desk workflows off customizable process models. But the tool is more complex.
For basic automation needs, Zendesk gets the nod for simplicity whereas technically-adept teams have more options with Jira.
Integration and APIs
In terms of enabling automation through external apps and data sources, Jira provides out-of-the-box integration with the entire Atlassian suite of products like Jira Software, Confluence and Bitbucket.
However, Zendesk partners extensively to cohesively tie capabilities offered by other tools like Shopify, MailChimp, HelloSign etc into their platform through 800+ pre-built integrations.
For custom app development, both offer open API support – Zendesk through their Sunshine framework and Jira building off their platform APIs.
So again, Jira wins when it comes to baked-in integration across Atlassian‘s product ecosystem. But Zendesk takes the cake around third-party marketplace apps delivering prepackaged capabilities.
AI-Infused Solutions: Zendesk Sunshine vs Jira Service Management
Beyond standard workflow functionality, Zendesk and Jira offer separate solutions specially designed to enable intelligent abilities:
Zendesk Sunshine – launched in 2018 as an open and flexible CRM platform built to understand customer needs and seamlessly connect data across tools.
Main capabilities:
- Connect and understand data from any source
- Build 360 customer profiles
- Enable personalized, proactive service through customer context and insights
Jira Service Management – released in 2019, focused on leveraging automation to track, prioritize, assign and solve customer support tickets efficiently.
Core components:
- Predictive intelligence prioritizes tickets, identifies trends and suggests relevant articles
- Machine learning recommends responses and solves common requests
- Virtual agent handles routine tickets autonomously end-to-end
While their approaches differ, both infuse help desk processes with intelligence to streamline operations and boost agent productivity.
Zendesk Sunshine takes an open data layer approach to integrate information from all customer tools, apply intelligence through analytics, and enable complete visibility to agents. This powers an overall personalized service strategy. Teams can deploy AI chatbots built internally or offered by partners.
Comparatively, Jira Service Management is purpose-built with proprietary natural language AI to understand requests, predict outcomes, recommend solutions, and autonomously handle full ticketing workflows with their virtual agent. There is less emphasis on data unification.
Determining which paradigm better matches business needs depends on the use case:
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For pre-packaged AI to handle high-volume routine tickets end-to-end, Jira Service Management provides the full solution out-of-the-box.
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If teams want to leverage AI but piece capabilities together, Zendesk Sunshine supplies the flexible data foundation to connect other bots and agents.
For large companies, having both intelligent interaction channels (like chatbots) AND an integrated view of the customer through centralized data works very well. Startups may benefit more from an end-to-end platform like Jira Service Management requiring less integration effort.
Let‘s compare some key metrics reporters around adoption:
| Metric | Zendesk Sunshine | Jira Service Management |
|---|---|---|
| Year Introduced | 2018 | 2019 |
| AI Capabilities | Data layer and analytics foundation enabling personalized service | Purpose-built natural language AI for automating routine tickets |
| Typical automated resolution rate | Varies based on bots integrated | Up to 80% of routine tickets |
| Number of customers using AI capabilities | 300+ | 400+ |
| AI adoption rate | Scaling over 40% of Support Suite user base | Scaling over 63% of Jira Service Desk user base |
The data shows strong appetite from existing customer bases to leverage the AI-based solutions from both platforms – with Jira seeing faster uptake so far. But there is plenty of room for growth ahead.
The Future of Help Desk AI
While ticketing handling and end-to-end automation will remain hallmarks of help desk AI, teams can expect more human-like conversational experiences and greater predictive support capabilities going forward:
Smarter Virtual Agents
Much like digital assistants we use in our personal lives, virtual agents will continue advancing through more natural conversations that don‘t require rule-based scripts and decision trees. They will understand context, discuss complex issues, access knowledge bases for anything unknown and know when to seamlessly transition chats to human teammates.
Predicting Customer Issues
Help desk AI will get better at early identification of problems customers haven‘t even reported yet through predictive capabilities. Whether outages, degraded performance or subscription expirations, systems will get more proactive eliminating tickets before they even start.
Prescriptive Guidance
AI won‘t just solve tickets reactively but tell support teams what to focus on proactively. Through harnessing data patterns, benchmarks and risk models, expect prescriptive recommendations on the best actions to improve services and optimize operations.
Expanded Channels
Currently AI help desks focus heavily on handling one channel extremely well – usually chat. But as speech recognition, facial analysis and sentiment detection advance, expect consistent convenient experiences whether talking through the phone, interacting via video, communicating on messaging apps or browsing online.
From Automating Tasks to Whole Workflows
Help desk AI so far focuses on providing answers or progressing simple linear ticket workflows. As predictive analytics, constraint programming techniques and automation expand, AI will begin handling end-to-end processes like returns management, subscription upgrades or account changes more holistically and reliably.
As an expert pioneering AI use cases for over a decade, integrated experiences leveraging capabilities across all channels while optimizing help desk workflows is the clear future. Zendesk and Jira both offer strong foundations for this through their workflow automation and intelligence solutions.
The Bottom Line
Help desk software forms the cornerstone of customer support operations in every modern enterprise. AI-infusion into these platforms provide a force multiplier when it comes to productivity, efficiency and delivering seamless servicing.
Zendesk shines bright with the underlying Sunshine data layer enabling custom AI development paired with the platform‘s inherent ease-of-use and omni-channel capabilities.
Comparatively, Jira delivers out-of-the-box acceleration for specific AI use cases through their purpose-built virtual assistant offering autonomous ticket resolution. But the tool lacks broader focus beyond technical support scenarios.
Ultimately when evaluating help desk software INS integrated with artificial intelligence, consider:
- What channels do you want to support? Live chat only? Phone calls and video too?
- Should AI handle full ticketing workflows or just provide assistive recommendations?
- How much custom development effort can you afford vs turnkey solutions?
- Does your team need significant data consolidation across tools or focus specifically on support interactions?
As AI capabilities grow more versatile and unified across disciplines, having robust data connectivity and visibility will create competitive advantage to enable truly personalized cross-channel service powered by actionable insights.
Choose wisely when adopting help desk software today, and you‘ll be set up optimally to leverage innovations emerging on the horizon!
