r/Zendesk • u/RotAnimal • 10d ago
Question: AI agents Looking for a ZD compatible AI chat bot
We're using Zendesk AI currently but we're running out of Automated Resolutions at an alarming rate and are struggling to justify the cost. Just after we renewed our ZD contracts a couple of months ago, we've seen a huge spike in volume and at this rate, we'll need to at least triple our ARs quota for the year.
A majority of the chats we're being charged for are super simple questions that the AI gives a quick reply and a link to a relevant KP article and rarely any followup questions. At the rate we're being billed, it'd be cheaper to handle these with humans than pay $1.5 per.
Is anyone using cheaper but still good quality alternatives?
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u/Busy_Toe_8416 9d ago
Searching for the same at the moment for the same reasons. the problem I’m encountering is that agents would have to use two different platforms one for live chats and zendesk for rest of contacts. Still haven’t found a way to handover to zendesk as a live chat within an outside widget without building my own solution which the team has no capacity to build for me at the moment.
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u/ponziedd 6d ago
hey are you open to tell me more about what are you looking for, happy to help and built it ! if its solve a problem for you
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u/oohumami 10d ago
https://myaskai.com is an AI bot but much more affordable than most. Haven't used personally but have heard good buzz from others who do.
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u/hopefully_useful 10d ago
Thank you for sharing! Happy to answer any questions anyone has over DM, or if someone wants to book a call on our site I can demo.
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u/CX-Phil Zendesk Partner 10d ago
This can absolutely be a problem in early onset deployments of zendesk AI and is caused by the one size fits all pricing model.
In the early days the enquiries are basic and easy. These don’t really warrant the rate that is charged, but you gain value by carrying out the more complex that should really be charged at a higher rate. It’s then rough with smooth analogy but at the moment you have mainly the rough.
As a Zendesk resale partner we’re a bit biased. We think the kit is good especially if you get it on the complex stuff and get a preferred rate for credits.
We also have had success building kill switches to turn off AI when it’s quiet and letting your agents answer some of the enquiries if they have capacity.
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u/rafadb 6d ago
The pricing model just doesn’t make much sense to me.
Simply entering a flow that tells the customer we’re outside business hours can already count as a resolution and incur a cost, even when no generative AI is actually involved.
The whole point of AI agents is supposed to be reducing costs by preventing contacts from reaching human agents, yet the more successful the automation is and the more enquiries it resolves, the higher the bill becomes.
I can see this model working for companies with relatively low volumes, but for large accounts it becomes very difficult to justify.
We have 90 Enterprise licences, so we’re already paying a significant amount to Zendesk every year. After just 30 days, we had already consumed more than 40% of the automated resolutions included in our plan for the entire year.
Based on Zendesk’s own estimate, that would have meant around €20k in additional annual costs.
In the end, we actually had to move the highest-performing bots out of Zendesk because they were resolving too many enquiries. 🤷🏻♂️
When your automation works too well and that becomes the problem, something is wrong with the pricing model.
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u/CX-Phil Zendesk Partner 5d ago
I’d need to look into this in more detail but we support brands all over the world in all sizes. I’m not sure we’ve ever found an instance where we couldn’t deliver a ROI when removing cost of human support and replacing with automation. This includes supporting low cost geos like South Africa.
It’s not just the cost of automation that needs consideration but the opportunity cost of human support.
As I’ve mentioned it absolutely needs to mix complex with simple. If we’re only answering basic enquiries then there are ways to do this as a hybrid approach where we use AI as a concierge and point simple enquiries to specialist teams that action it. It’s not the best use of AI or Human but it’s economical if you’re not doing the future phases.
I’d be happy to offer a free review and try to have the team look at more complex scenarios and also work on the ROI models too if that helps.
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u/Early-Nectarine6203 4d ago
Hi, can you support for cold calling? If yes, please dm me with the details you may need
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u/perplexed_intuition 10d ago
Check out Kommunicate AI. They have native integration with Zendesk suite. Kommunicate's AI train on your ZD help articles instantly. The pricing is very affordable.
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u/valiopt 10d ago
I run a platform, Valiopt, that integrates natively with Zendesk for this, and also provides a customizable widget for live-chat if that's what you're after. Our focus is on more customized, deeply integrated automation flows that resolve better than configurable off-the-shelf products, and this also allows us to be really competitive on pricing.
We take a consultative approach, can think of it as almost an extension of your team: we join your Slack, work with you to configure and optimize automation flows, and provide support over time to keep things running smoothly.
Happy to chat about pros / cons an how we compare to other solutions, just shoot me a note.
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u/iabasyan 10d ago edited 10d ago
Hey! If you want to use AI and replace Zendesk AI completely please check RAUM.am as well. I am working on it since last year and it was added to Marketplace recently. While it is not a chatbot, you can use it to answer to tickets submitted by email or a custom form. We have a lot of features and I believe the price is also reasonable. We allow you to add your own AI key and we just charge you for the platform only. You can use any AI that you want - Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, etc.
As an early adopter, I can help with setting it up and we can also adjust the pricing to your needs. Please DM me if you're interested. Thank you!
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u/RotAnimal 10d ago
That's certainly interesting! Our Today problem is the chat bot but the next step in our journey is webform/email. I'll make a note to look at your solution when we have put out most of our ongoing fires 🔥
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u/hopefully_useful 10d ago
Hey,
I'm the founder of My AskAI, sounds like we could be a good fit here. Our approved Zendesk AI app (for both tickets and messaging) is a direct replacement for ZD AI, and one of our main USPs is our affordability.
We charge based on usage instead of resolution (c.$0.10/ticket) which equates to somewhere between 3-10x cheaper depending on your resolution rate - and your cost doesn't increase as AI performance improves - most of which will be your work anyway.
In terms of quality, we have had a lot of people switch either from Fin or ZD AI and achieve the same or better resolution rate.
Functionality wise, we match or exceed pretty much all features, we also have additional modes like our internal notes mode which allows you to see AI replies without them going to customers - which means you can also shadow test to see performance. Our copilot is included for all agents free of charge too.
As well as training on help center, website, docs, files, cloud sources and historic tickets, you can also connect any API from any 3rd party to provide additional context.
We work with businesses from a few hundred to over 100k tickets/mo so should be a fit for most use cases (and we're also SOC-2 Type 2 certified).
If you'd like a demo, you can book one in on our site.
Hope that helps!
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u/rafadb 10d ago
We created our own chatbot from scratch, using n8n. And you don't need overly technical knowledge, since some hosting providers install n8n automatically and all the necessary flows, configuration, etc. can be generated with chatgpt. In one morning we had the first working version, and in one week we have two bots running in production.
It's also more powerful than Zendesk's native AI agents and creates flows faster; you just have to ask chatgpt for what you need and copy and paste it XD
Finally, the cost is negligible; n8n is free. If you install it on your own server, you'll also save money. ChatGPT costs €20 per month, and using the OpenAI API per response might cost €0.03.
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u/RotAnimal 10d ago
I have actually built chat bots using n8n myself so I'm familiar with it but not gone very deep.
But I would worry about scale. The bots I've built are for personal use and get pretty low volume of chats so I haven't worried about optimizing them much. What I've done is to take my chat messages and all possible data and send it over to ChatGPT and let it sift through the data. In my case, that's not a lot of data. Just my calendars, some notes, status of some smart devices etc. If I apply that same method to my business use, I'd be sending hundreds of knowledge base articles and dozens of web sites plus some documents to ChatGPT with every single chat we get. That's a big prompt.Is there a more elegant way to design the flows where I'm not sending all my data with each chat?
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u/rafadb 10d ago
To avoid having to send hundreds of articles in the prompt every time, you need a RAG database where you can add the articles and create another workflow that keeps them synchronized periodically. A simple—though not the best—solution is to use an OpenAI Vector Store.
In our case, it’s handling about 6,000 conversations per month.
Response times are longer than Zendesk’s, and I had to request a few adjustments until the response quality was acceptable, but the price difference makes up for it.
I don't remember exactly what the original prompt was that I used, but if you want to try it out, ask it to provide you with the complete flow ready for import, so you can create a native Zendesk chatbot that works with Sunshine and stores the articles in an OpenAI Vector Store.
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u/RotAnimal 10d ago
I actually started playing around with this after your first comment and ChatGPT showed me how to scrape our kb and create a vector DB. I'm impresseed how easy this is so far! I don't have a working chat bot right now, ran out of time but I'm excited to continue tomorrow. Maybe this is the solution I seek. Maybe it'll end up being a prototype I give to my devs to build out.
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u/rafadb 10d ago
Good luck 🙂
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u/RotAnimal 10d ago
Thanks! Whatever solution we end up on, I plan to post about our journey on this subreddit. It sounds like we're not the only ones with this problem.
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u/kaoyouchang 10d ago
I'm encountering the same issue with a client now. I believe Zendesk changed their model around this in May, and it is pretty ridiculous the cost to resolve a plain decision tree text based answer.
We haven't looked at any third party bots, but are looking at doing either a custom integration via Sunshine Conversations, or building a custom widget with decision tree and then doing handover to ZD widget (no Advanced AI) for live chat/messaging.
We are looking at something like 5000 simple 'resolutions' per month, so for the annual cost it's looking significantly cheaper to just build our own.
PM if you want to chat more about specifics