A Zendesk Answerbot Alternative: Alhena AI
Zendesk Answerbot is inflexible, old technology and relies on mapping a list of predetermined answers to a series of intents. Alhena AI uses generative AI to ingest your knowledge, understand complex customer questions, and create highly relevant answers. Moreover, Alhena AI doesn't hallucinate.

Like many others, are using Zendesk Suite to streamline your customer service operations? And most likely, using the Zendesk Answer Bot as your primary customer service chatbot.
If so, you're missing out on the full potential of AI to transform your customer support. How so?
Zendesk Answerbot uses older AI technology. The result is, your customers often won't get great answers from Answerbot. You'll also need to put in more work to both install and maintain Answerbot.
Zendesk's bots that use generative AI are still in Beta testing phase. So, it would take time before effective productization.
Before we explain what's withholding Zendesk Answerbot, here is a glimpse into Zendesk.
What is Zendesk?
Zendesk is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses manage their customer service. The software solution provides tools for ticketing, tracking, and prioritizing customer inquiries.
It aims to centralize customer support processes and tackle customer concerns.
What is Zendek Answerbot?
Zendesk Answerbot is an automated customer chat solution. It helps automate responses to customer inquiries. It takes some stress off your customer support representatives while assisting them.
How Zendesk Answerbot Works
The Answer Bot Zendesk operates on predefined categories known as "intents".
Intents are based on Zendesk's existing user interaction data from across all its customers. Answerbot matches customer queries to a specific intent.
Before going live with answer bot, you'll need to write a large list of pre-determined answers.
Then you'll need to map intents to those answers. Each intent can only be mapped to one answer. An answer, however, can have multiple intents associated with it.
Problems with Zendesk Answerbot
Multiple problems exist with this intent-based system.
(1) Zendesk's predetermined intents may or may not be a good match to your business.
Your customers might have many other different intents, outside of Zendesk intents. Answerbot won't be able to answer those questions at all.
(2) It's a lot of work, and it's error prone.
You need to create and maintain a list of answers.
You need to map intents to these answers.
What if you forget to write an answer for a specific intent? Answerbot won't be able to answer thos questions.
What if you make a mistake mapping intents to questions? Answerbot will show the wrong answer to a customer.
(3) What if a question has multiple intents in it?
Answerbot is programmed to find one primary intent per question. But customers can often have multiple intents in a given question.
What this means is, Answerbot will only determine one intent for a given question, and (at best) show only one answer. That one answer will be incomplete, relative to the customer's actual intent.
So, while Zendesk Answerbot is useful, it is not the best at handling complex customer queries it, especially those that don't fit into Zendesk's predetermined intents.
And this is only one of the many drawbacks. Other problems hinder Answerbot Zendesk potential.
(4) Difficulty Handling Evolving Queries
Customer queries evolve. New trends emerge as well. When that happens, the predefined intents become outdated. Keeping the intents up-to-date and reflective of current customer needs requires ongoing effort.
(5) Frustrating User Experience
Users get frustrated with bot-generated, irrelevant or incomplete answers. They want a more conversational and dynamic interaction.
So, if you are considering Zendesk Answerbot, think again. Especially when you have a more potent, and dynamic chatbot solution available like Alhena AI.
What is Alhena AI?
A winner of nine G2 Winter 2024 Awards in the chatbots & AI chatbots categories, Alhena AI is a game-changer.
Alhena AI uses geneartive AI to provides highly relevant, company specific answers to complex customer questions.
In addition, Alhena AI does not hallucinate. AI hallucination is when the AI chatbot generates unrealistic, incorrect, or nonsensical outputs.
Alhena AI has many features that make it better than Zendesk answerbot. Moreover, if you are a Zendesk user, it is pre-integrated across the Zendesk Suite.
Benefits of Alhena AI over Zendesk Answerbot
- Effortless Knowledge Integration: Alhena AI retrieves information from your support knowledge bases. So you don't need to craft extensive inputs or exhaustive FAQs.
- Advanced Understanding of Complex Queries: Alhena AI demonstrates a heightened comprehension of intricate customer inquiries, thanks to the Large Language Models (LLMs) it uses.
- Real-time knowledge retrieval: Alhena AI conducts automatic searches within your knowledge base. Then provides relevant and accurate responses in real time.
- No Hallucination: Unlike many generative AI chatbots that hallucinate, Alhena AI responds accurately.
- Human-like Customer Interaction: Alhena AI exhibits empathy when addressing customer concerns. It leads to more human-like interactions.
- Dynamic Language Detection: Alhena AI identifies almost 100 foreign languages and responds in the user's language. This allows for overcoming language barriers in customer service.
- Auto-Updating of Knowledge: Alhena AI regularly recrawls your knowledge, ensuring its responses remain current.
- Intelligent Agent Transfers: Alhena AI transfers user queries to live agents during business hours. After business hours, it sends them to email support.
- Feedback-driven Improvement: Learns and enhances performance based on both user and administrator feedback.
- Multi-channel Integration: Alhena AI integrates effortlessly with various platforms. These include Live chat, Email, Slack, Discord, text messages, and more.
- Enterprise System Integration: Alhena AI can be integrated with other enterprise systems, expanding customer self-service capabilities.
- Flexible Customization: You can clone Alhena AI bots and modify them to support different customer segments.
Conclusion
If you want a more human-like, accurate chatbot, Alhena AI stands out over Zendesk Answerbot.
Alhena AI award-winning chatbot takes customer service automation to new heights.
Fewer hallucinations mean more satisfied customers. And less stress on your customer support team.
The easy setup makes Alhena AI an excellent tool for delivering exceptional customer experience. It will be a powerful addition to the Zendesk Suite.
Request a demo of Alhena AI, or create a free generative AI chatbot using Alhena AI now.