In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Hannah Deveney, Senior Director of Product Management at Zendesk, about the changing role of voice in AI-powered customer service.
As AI agents handle more routine requests, live calls are increasingly reserved for urgent, sensitive, and complicated issues. Deveney explains why Zendesk is bringing real-time, two-way translation into its contact center, and why the technology needs strong guardrails before it reaches high-risk customer journeys.
Voice was supposed to be fading from customer service. Instead, it is becoming the channel customers choose when the stakes are highest.
Deveney discusses Zendesk’s Real-Time Voice Translation, a new capability designed to help customers and agents communicate naturally across languages during live calls.
In this interview, Deveney covers: 🔴 Why voice still accounts for around 40% of contact center contacts among Zendesk customers, and why calls are becoming more complex as AI agents resolve routine issues. 🔴 How language-specific queues can force a trade-off between speaking to an agent in your own language and reaching the person with the right expertise. 🔴 Why preserving customer context through every transfer, channel, and language is critical for fraud, billing, healthcare, and other high-stakes conversations. 🔴 How contact centers should roll out voice translation carefully, starting with lower-risk use cases, retaining audit trails, and keeping human oversight in place.
As Deveney puts it, “When a call is escalated to a human, it’s usually a more complex issue or it’s more sensitive.”
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