AI is a marathon, not a sprint: Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier on the evolution of customer service

Tom Eggemeier knows a thing or two about customer experience. Long before he was the CEO of Zendesk, his grandparents operated a small grocery store in Covington, Kentucky.

“They gave amazing, proactive, personalized customer service to the people that shopped in their store, and I remember being in there,” he says. “They knew everyone’s name, they anticipated what they needed.”

He’s keenly aware that customer experience (CX) has changed a lot since breaking out of brick and mortar into the digital realm—but he also realizes that CX has lost a lot of its luster.

“Over the last 20 or 30 years, it became impersonal, reactive.”

But the right tools, the right strategy, and the right technological innovations solve these problems.

In the last episode of season one, Conversations with Zendesk host Nicole Saunders sits down with Eggemeier to chat about how AI has changed customer service over the last couple of years, where it’s going, and what’s next for Zendesk in 2024.

This episode covers:

• The evolution of customer service, from brick-and-mortar retail to the spectrum of digital, immersive experiences
• Eggemeier’s thoughts on how “digital agents” are augmenting customer experience
• A sneak peek into the future of Zendesk over the next year, from product advancements to Relate 2024

Conversations with Zendesk will be back in 2024 with new episodes. Catch us on January 17 when we sit down with Zendesk’s Joey Edwards to discuss the research that went into the upcoming 2024 CX Trends report.