Expert Interview on Zendesk QA
Service quality is a key component of outstanding customer experiences that foster long-term loyalty and become a strategic value driver. But how can companies ensure consistently high quality, transparency, and efficiency in customer service?
Zendesk QA offers an automated, AI-powered solution for data-driven quality assurance.
Marc Voigt, Solution Consultant at Zendesk, explained in our interview how QA managers can fully monitor customer interactions, precisely optimize service experiences, and work up to 80 percent more efficiently.
What Is Zendesk QA?
What exactly can companies expect from Zendesk QA, and who is it designed for?
Zendesk QA is our AI-powered platform for automated quality assurance in customer service and is ideal for any company looking to continuously improve its service quality. Artificial intelligence takes over the analysis and evaluation of all customer interactions — across software systems and communication channels. By intelligently linking these data-driven insights, Zendesk QA also functions as a business intelligence platform: the AI can, for instance, identify patterns and process gaps within workflows, providing valuable insights for optimization in other areas of the organization.
Why are automation and AI valuable for quality assurance in customer service?
In a hybrid, fragmented support landscape — where customers might move from a chatbot to an email conversation with a human agent and later to phone support — the risk of inconsistent service quality is high, often leading to frustration. Manually reviewing interactions only allows a small sample to be analyzed, typically around 2 to 5 percent. Especially in an omnichannel environment, ensuring quality in customer service becomes a time-consuming task with limited strategic impact. Manual spot checks do not provide a complete picture of customer satisfaction or the overall quality of conversations and service. Zendesk QA fundamentally changes that.
How exactly does Zendesk QA address this challenge?
By combining specialized AI capabilities, customer interactions can be analyzed, evaluated, and tracked automatically with a high degree of precision. This enables a comprehensive and objective assessment of service quality. One major advantage of Zendesk QA is its cross-channel transparency. Whether it’s email, messaging, phone calls, or AI chatbots — Zendesk QA includes all channels and ensures a consistent quality standard, contributing to a coherent customer experience throughout the entire customer journey.
Data-Driven & Automated: Service Quality with Zendesk QA
You mentioned several AI capabilities — what exactly sets Zendesk QA apart?
The core functionality is built on two interlocking components: AutoQA and the Spotlight Filter.
- AutoQA is the driving force of the platform. It reviews all customer interactions, provides standardized, AI-driven scoring, and ensures unbiased quality evaluation — not based on random samples, but for 100 percent of all interactions. The assessment is based on predefined criteria such as empathy, tone, and grammar, which can be individually selected and customized.
- The Spotlight Filter, on the other hand, helps find the needle in the haystack — it highlights the interactions that require human attention: those with particularly high value or critical tendencies. Potential churn conversations — where signs of customer attrition or escalation appear — repetitive bots (so-called „loopy bots“), or unusual patterns like long pauses („dead air“) are detected with over 90 percent accuracy. Users can also create their own Spotlights to focus on the most valuable, critical, or instructive cases for their organization.
How does Zendesk QA make information from different interaction channels usable for analysis — for example, from AI bots and voice interactions?
Zendesk QA also evaluates the quality of interactions with AI systems such as chatbots, copilots, and AI agents. However, AutoQA analysis is not limited to text-based channels like email and messaging. For voice interactions, such as phone calls, the Voice QA feature uses automatic speech-to-text transcription. It then analyzes the conversation for critical aspects such as silence or pauses, as well as compliance adherence — for example, whether the required recording disclaimer was mentioned. This significantly accelerates and simplifies the analysis of voice interactions.
AI in Customer Service as a Value Driver & Competitive Advantage
How does Zendesk QA change the role of QA managers and add tangible value to daily operations?
The combination of AutoQA and Spotlight leads to a fundamental realignment of the role and tasks of a QA manager. Whereas previously they could laboriously review a small number of tickets as an auditor, Zendesk QA frees them from this auditing burden and brings both completeness and focus to the review process: AutoQA handles mass evaluations, while the Spotlight Filter serves as a strategic guide for intelligent prioritization. As a result, QA managers gain far more capacity for value-adding activities — such as holistic quality oversight, targeted optimization, and the development of proactive strategies.
From Business Insights to Business Value with Zendesk QA
How exactly does Zendesk QA support proactive, continuous improvement of service quality?
Zendesk QA goes beyond simply evaluating service quality. The platform also uncovers insights into broader trends, business opportunities, and risks — such as process gaps or churn tendencies. These business insights can directly inform product development and process optimization, but also enhance training programs, personalized feedback, and coaching for both human agents and AI assistants like chatbots or copilots. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement and creates sustainable business value. Customer service thus evolves from a pure cost center into a strategic value driver — efficient, measurable, and scalable.
How is this added value reflected in measurable results?
Our customers report up to 80 percent time savings in quality assurance and 20 percent faster ticket processing. At the same time, customer satisfaction rose significantly — in many cases by more than 75 percent. And not to be overlooked: reduced manual effort and more efficient processes typically lead to lower operational costs.
So, how can companies start using Zendesk QA?
The platform can be added to any Zendesk package — regardless of whether a company is already using Zendesk or not.
At valantic, our certified experts provide end-to-end support in selecting and implementing the right Zendesk solution. Thank you for your insights into Zendesk QA, Marc!
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