Every customer interaction teaches a company something, but the lesson rarely travels beyond the person or AI agent who handled it, said executives at Zenarate. That runs the risk of the same problems coming back again and again.
In turn, Zenarate has positioned itself as a frontline performance platform for humans and AI. It helps enterprises take what every interaction teaches, share it across their people and AI agents, and make sure it improves the next customer experience.
“We see this pattern all the time,” said Rob Wright, Chief Product Officer at Zenarate. “A customer talks to an AI agent or a person, and the conversation ends without escalation. But the problem isn’t fixed, so they call back a couple of days later.”
From the company’s side, that first call often gets marked a success because the rubric used to evaluate it shows the frontline team member followed the process. But the customer had to do the work twice, Wright continued. The company had what it needed to catch that but never surfaced it or acted on it.
“We can now follow that customer’s journey across every contact and change the definition of success: ‘did the problem get solved?’ AI agent tuning, associate training and coaching, and process fixes are now all automatically tied to that standard,” he said.
Customers have made their expectations clear. They’re happy to use AI, as long as it works and a human is available when needed. In a recent Gartner survey of 3,566 customers, half of respondents said generative AI made their service interactions easier, and 87% said access to a person is essential. The cost of getting it wrong is steep. A separate Gartner survey also found that only 27% of customers would try a chatbot again after a negative experience.
According to the company executives, the Zenarate brand is built on the idea of closing the customer experience loop. Every customer conversation teaches a company what worked and what didn’t. The loop is how that lesson changes the next conversation, and how the company knows it did.
“Most companies hear the lesson and leave it hanging. Zenarate helps them close the loop, conversation after conversation,” said the company.
Zenarate judges success by whether the customer’s problem got solved. It follows every contact a customer makes about the same issue, from AI agent to associate and back again, and reads them as one story. From there, it’s clear what to change. That might be practice for associates, an improvement to an AI agent, a better escalation, or a policy or process change the enterprise makes itself. An escalation isn’t automatically a failure. Handing a customer to the right person at the right moment, without making them repeat themselves, can be exactly what good service looks like.
The goal is to make people and AI agents better at the same time. People get better through simulation practice and coaching. AI agents get better through a knowledge fix, a workflow change or a smarter escalation rule. Zenarate connects the two through shared evidence, so each side makes the other better. Escalations and AI interactions show where associates need more preparation, and what top-performing associates do shapes how AI agents are built.
“Information is not improvement until something changes,” said Brian Tuite, CEO of Zenarate. “Every company’s frontline is becoming people and AI working together. The companies that pull ahead will learn the fastest from every customer interaction, so the next customer gets a straight answer and moves on with their day. That’s what we’ve built Zenarate to do.”
