2024 has been a year like no other. AI has moved from buzzword to business-critical, and innovation isn’t just about keeping up—it’s about staying ahead. Across industries, companies have been rethinking how they deliver service, leaning on tools that make it faster, smarter, and more personal.
At Zendesk, we’ve been busy launching new capabilities to meet the growing needs of service leaders—from AI that automates everyday tasks to tools that streamline operations and keep data secure. Here are three ways we can help you drive success for businesses in 2025.
- Embrace AI-powered innovations: Companies that embrace AI are unlocking massive efficiency gains.
- Level up your operational excellence: Service teams are leaning on new tools to automate repetitive tasks.
- Strengthen security at scale: Service leaders are managing more data than ever before, and it’s never been more important to do so securely.
With these themes in mind, we’ve generated a checklist of the top 10 innovations we’ve shipped in 2024. How many have you implemented this year?
Ways to embrace AI-powered innovations
1. Deploy AI agents that automate up to 80% of inquiries
One of the most impactful ways to embrace AI is to deploy AI agents. We kicked off 2024 with a transformative leap by unveiling AI agents, an innovation that sets a new standard in how businesses service customers and employees. These AI agents leverage cutting-edge AI technology to autonomously resolve up to 80% of queries across all service channels, with minimal setup or supervision. Get started in minutes by integrating your knowledge base to immediately resolve FAQs. You can also fully customize your AI agent to work with your business systems, enabling them to handle even the most complex cases.
Learn more: Getting started with AI agents | An introduction to AI agents: The future of CX
2. Turn on agent copilot to give your agents AI at their fingertips
To help your service team embrace AI, turn on agent copilot. This proactive AI-driven tool streamlines tasks and enhances customer and employee interactions. At the heart of agent copilot is auto assist. When working in auto assist mode, copilot guides agents to faster and more accurate resolutions. Copilot will begin by providing the right insights such as sentiment, language, and intent. Then, next steps will be suggested based on business procedures—instantly generating suggested responses, or even taking action on behalf of the agent. Agents need only to review and approve copilot suggestions.
Learn more: About agent copilot | Zendesk agent copilot featuring auto assist
3. Remove after-call work and boost productivity 20%
Let AI do the heavy lifting with phone support. Earlier this year, we relaunched our native voice solution with AI embedded throughout the call journey. This enhancement enables AI to autonomously resolve 50% of customer calls—like checking order statuses or making reservations—freeing up human agents to support priority customers or complex issues. Transcripts and summaries are automatically generated after each call and attached to tickets for easy reference, allowing searches for specific cues to trigger workflows. With AI-powered voice completely transforming the way customer calls are handled, you can bid farewell to repetitive answers and manual note-taking, while enjoying a remarkable 90% increase in answer rate—just like financial services company Esusu. Plus, ensure high and consistent service quality with Zendesk Voice QA capabilities.
Learn more: Zendesk AI-powered transcripts and summaries for voice calls
4. Track the impact of AI on your team’s performance
In 2024, we also focused on making it easier to track and understand how AI is improving your support teams’ performance and service operations. Especially with pre-built dashboards that are ready to go. View how many times your team has generated a ticket summary, or gain clear visibility into your operations by learning what your customers are asking about and how they feel with intelligent triage pre-built dashboard. If you want to dig deeper, the new dashboard builder will easily create and maintain your dashboards. These tools make it simple to track how AI is helping your support team and gain insights to improve your service operations, so you can stay efficient and keep your customers happy.
Learn more: Intelligent triage dashboard | Dashboard builder
Ways to level up your operational excellence
5. Automatically create agent schedules with Zendesk WFM
Level-up your operational excellence by streamlining how you manage staffing and scheduling. Earlier this year, Zendesk launched Workforce Management (WFM) to further eliminate team inefficiencies by simplifying forecasting, scheduling, and performance tracking. WFM enables you to optimize your staffing process: forecast staffing needs with AI based on Zendesk data, automatically creating schedules so you always have the right number of agents available, and adjusting those schedules on the fly when faced with unexpected changes in demand. Your team’s activity and adherence can also be reviewed using real-time monitoring, customizable dashboards, and historical reporting. Thanks to WFM, companies like bike-sharing company Tembici have cut resolution times by 80%.
Learn more: Zendesk WFM resources | Interactive tour | Zendesk WFM overview
6. Implement Zendesk QA to improve service quality and CSAT
In 2024, we released the native AI-powered QA add-on to help you maintain high service quality across channels and during peak times. With AutoQA you can automatically score the quality of 100% of interactions, while Spotlight flags churn risk, looping bots, and other critical interactions for human review. Easily identify underperforming agents and decreasing quality trends on your service quality dashboards, and assign targeted coaching to improve agent performance. This continuous process boosts human and AI agent performance alike, leading to consistent service quality and happier customers—like Liberty, the luxury retailer, enjoying a 2.3% increase in CSAT.
Learn more: Overview of Zendesk QA | Zendesk QA resources | Zendesk QA product tour
7. Maximize service levels with advanced omnichannel routing capabilities
Creating a seamless hand-off from AI Agent to human agent is critical. To help with this, Zendesk introduced several omnichannel routing enhancements in 2024 to more efficiently route tickets across service channels—including voice and SMS messages—to the appropriate agent. Use skills-based routing and create custom routing queues to manage incoming queries effectively, while also ensuring that customers don’t wait too long for the right agent by redirecting them to secondary agent groups when overflow is needed. You can now further customize routing based on your specific needs—such as prioritizing tickets nearest service level agreement (SLA) breaches, routing based on agent capacity, or, by popular request, round robin assignment—while also incorporating ticket intent, language, and sentiment into your routing rules with intelligent triage.
Learn more: Zendesk advanced routing queues and secondary overflow groups
8. Connect data across systems with custom objects
Besides having the right tools, exceptional service interactions depend on having the right data at the right time. Throughout 2024, Zendesk has improved custom objects, allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate their data within Zendesk. Custom objects allow customers to include non-service data in help center forms, macros, triggers—all without relying on developers. A retailer can store order information in a custom object, and display it to customers during a return. The retailer would then access saved data from custom workspaces, and optimize operations with integrated analytics. This ensures that orders from the previous example are automatically displayed in the agent workspace, triggering a return process in an external system. Some call it magic, we call it custom objects. SaaS company Optimizely simply says: 97% CSAT score.
Learn more: Custom object resources | Zendesk custom objects data importer, dynamic filters, object triggers
Ways to strengthen security at scale
9. Limit storage of sensitive customer data
As data privacy and security risks continued to rise globally in 2024—and are expected to remain a top concern in 2025 and beyond—it’s crucial to have the right data protection tools and strategies in place. Start by limiting sensitive personal data storage with customized and automated data deletion schedules that use advanced data retention policies. You can now automatically highlight sensitive personal data—such as names, email addresses, and bank account numbers—so agents can easily redact it with AI-powered redaction suggestions. Gain an additional level of security with Zendesk Advanced Data Privacy and Protection—like Indigov does, leveraging Zendesk to bring elected U.S. representatives closer to their constituents.
Learn more: Advanced data privacy and protection | Zendesk advanced data privacy and protection
10. Restrict ticket data sharing across departments
To further enhance data management, Zendesk introduced Department Spaces in 2024. This innovation enables your organization to manage multiple departments while maintaining data privacy between them. Using department-based memberships, simply assign agents and tickets to internal departments (like HR, IT, and Legal) or external divisions (like brands). Your agents will only be able to view data from tickets within their assigned departments, ensuring data privacy. Plus, it eliminates the need for multiple Zendesk instances, simplifying data management and boosting scalability.
Learn more: Department spaces with omnichannel routing
Ready to make 2025 your most innovative year yet?
Check out our just-launched CX Trends report to uncover what’s top of mind for trendsetting businesses, see how AI is driving strong ROI for them, and prepare for what’s next in CX.