
Zendesk: AI Is Taking the Easy Calls, but Voice Support Is Getting Harder
In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Hannah Deveney, Senior Director of Product Management at Zendesk, about the changing role of voice in AI-powered customer service. As AI agents handle more routine requests, live calls are increasingly reserved for urgent, sensitive, and complicated issues. Deveney explains why Zendesk is bringing real-time, two-way translation into its contact center, and why the technology needs strong guardrails before it reaches high-risk customer journeys. Voice was supposed to be fading from customer service. Instead, it is becoming the channel customers choose when the stakes are highest. Deveney discusses Zendesk’s Real-Time Voice Translation, a new capability designed to help customers and agents communicate naturally across languages during live calls. In this interview, Deveney covers: 🔴 Why voice still accounts for around 40% of contact center contacts among Zendesk customers, and why calls are becoming more complex as AI agents resolve routine issues. 🔴 How language-specific queues can force a trade-off between speaking to an agent in your own language and reaching the person with the right expertise. 🔴 Why preserving customer context through every transfer, channel, and language is critical for fraud, billing, healthcare, and other high-stakes conversations. 🔴 How contact centers should roll out voice translation carefully, starting with lower-risk use cases, retaining audit trails, and keeping human oversight in place. As Deveney puts it, “When a call is escalated to a human, it’s usually a more complex issue or it’s more sensitive.” For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com
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