Recommendations for navigating your Copilot trial

Welcome to your trial of Zendesk Copilot! We can't wait for you to explore the powerful features that will enhance your customer support service. With Copilot, you will streamline your operations, improve agent productivity, and elevate customer satisfaction. We know adopting AI can be overwhelming, so this guide will help you take it one step at a time and discover the tangible impact that AI can have on your business.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support

Professional or Enterprise









Welcome to your trial of Zendesk Copilot! We can't wait for you to
explore the powerful features that will enhance your customer support
service. With Copilot, you will streamline your operations, improve agent
productivity, and elevate customer satisfaction. We know adopting AI can be
overwhelming, so this guide will help you take it one step at a time and
discover the tangible impact that AI can have on your business.

If you're new to Copilot, see About Zendesk
Copilot.
If you're a power user, dive deeper into Resources for Zendesk Copilot.

This article provides a map to maximizing your Copilot trial. Topics include:

(Optional) Week 0: Optimize your knowledge base for AI
Week 1: Get started with intelligent triage
Week 2: Get started with agent copilot
Week 3: Launch your AI agents
Week 4: AI dashboards and crafting your pitch
Week 5: Wrap up


Note: If you haven't started your trial already, review our Best practices guide and refer
to Starting a Copilot trial to
get rolling.


(Optional) Week 0: Optimize your knowledge base for AI

A well-organized knowledge base is crucial for helping users
find answers and troubleshoot issues. Creating one is just the
beginning: Your knowledge base must be tailored to meet user needs
and continuously updated to remain relevant.

Why this optional step? By optimizing your Zendesk
knowledge base as you start the Copilot trial, you'll unlock the
ability to automate high-volume inquiries using our AI agents
(previously known as bots) included with Zendesk Suite to quickly
deliver value and provide more accurate customer support
interactions.
Note: This step is not a prerequisite for
setting up intelligent triage. Feel free to do this in
tandem.

To optimize


Know your goals and users. Start by defining
what you want to achieve with your knowledge base and who
will be using it. Understanding your audience helps you
create content that meets their needs.

Identify common issues. Look at frequent
support tickets and popular macros to spot recurring
problems. This insight will guide you in creating relevant
content. Organize your information clearly, and write in a
way that's easy for users to understand.

Make content easy to find. Use tags and labels
to boost the visibility of your articles. Implementing semantic
search can also help users quickly locate the
information they need.

Keep improving. Track how your knowledge base
is performing by monitoring article views, feedback, and
comments. This will help you spot areas for improvement and
ensure your content stays useful over time.

Additional resources

5 strategies for
building up your knowledge center content for
AI
Maintaining and
improving your knowledge base




Week 1: Get started with intelligent triage

Intelligent triage uses AI to automatically classify why a
customer is reaching out (their topic), in which
language the ticket is written, and whether the
customer's message is positive or negative (its sentiment).
You can also use entity detection to
detect specific products and other key words (entities) and
automate workflows based on that information.
Why this step? Setting up intelligent triage will allow
you to understand your CS operations and act on insights faster,
automate top recurring requests, eliminate manual triage and boost
operational efficiency, and streamline your operations by
identifying and acting fast on urgent issues.


Week 1, Day 1: Set yourself up for success and configure intelligent
triage



Set goals for a successful trial.
Decide which metrics are important to you and your
leadership team, and configure your trial in a way
that will meet your goals. Zendesk recommends
orienting around the following KPIs:
Customer sentiment
Agent efficiency. First Response
Time and Agent Handle Time
Customer experience analysis.
Customer interactions and retention



Block your calendar. Set aside time
halfway through the trial (end of week 2) and near
the end of the trial (end of week 4) to track
performance and make sure you are aligning to your
stakeholders' goals.

Notify your agents about the trial,
especially the agent copilot features. Use our
template to encourage your employees to try
these features as soon as possible.
Note: We
dedicate Week 2 to using agent features.



Get set up. Configure intelligent
triage.
Verify that intelligent triage is
turned on in your account and read how to configure
intelligent triage settings.

Watch a demo
for a visual walk through.






Week 1, Day 2: Understand your operations and automate top recurring
requests



Understand your operations. Discover
top incoming request topics and shift
teams' priorities in real time to identify knowledge
gaps and resolve incoming requests faster. For
example, you could group together similar topics
for a specific team to streamline operational
efficiency.

Identify top
topics, customer sentiment, and
language.

Track against your
KPIs.



Automate top recurring requests. Allow
customers to self-serve across common request types
where documentation is readily available,
like return policy, profile update, or subscription
cancellation. For example, ensure you have the right
knowledge base articles to deflect tickets.

Send an auto reply
to high confidence topics.






Week 1, Day 3: Eliminate manual triage

Display incoming requests to specific agent or agent
groups based on the topic, custom entity (entity
classification), sentiment, and language so
the tickets are being tackled by the right agents. Improve
the efficiency of workflows by routing the ticket to the
correct approval flow based on the topic. You can assign incoming
requests to the right agent or agent group
automatically.



Use custom entity (entity
detection) to detect products mentioned in
tickets and show them in a view for agents.

Use the ticket's automatically
detected language to assign the ticket to
agents who speak that language.

Improve workflow efficiency by
routing tickets to the correct approval flow based
on topic.





Week 1, Day 4: Streamline operations



Identify escalations easily and customize SLA rules
based on topic and sentiment to prioritize
requests.

Automatically request missing
information for a request type where the
mandatory field is missing and reduce multiple-touch
conversations.

Collect critical customer information
proactively and update ticket information based on
topic.




Week 1, Day 5: Track your progress

Use the Zendesk intelligent triage
dashboard to track your progress. The Explore
intelligent triage dashboard provides valuable insights into
your tickets, which can be used to improve your workflows and
determine how effective your support is. For example, you
can see why your users are reaching out (with topics) and
how they feel (with sentiment).




Week 2: Get started with agent copilot

Why this step? Zendesk's agent copilot empowers customer support
representatives by automatically generating personalized,
contextually relevant draft responses to reduce response times,
improve consistency, and allow agents to focus on more complex
problem-solving and customer relationship building. These features
provide immediate value to agents by reducing agent handle time and
aiding agents in composing friendly and professional responses in
seconds.


Week 2, Day 1: Familiarize yourself with agent copilot



Watch
the demo.

Read our agent
copilot resource to see copilot's
potential.
Note: Copilot offers many capabilities,
but for this trial, we recommend setting up two
features: enhance
writing and ticket
summaries.





Week 2, Day 2: Notify your team about agent copilot features

Notify your team on the copilot features they can now
access if you haven't already. View our best practices
guide here to help ease them into the
transition of using AI in their role. We know it can be
overwhelming, and our best practices will help assuage their
emotions and keep your trial on track.



Week 2, Days 3 and 4: Discover more agent copilot features



Learn about
Enhance
writing.

Learn about
Ticket
summaries, including call
summaries.




Week 2, Day 5: Nearly halfway



Track metrics with our Generative AI Agent
Tools dashboard.

Check in with your goals, team, and
dashboards.

Learn. Take agent copilot to the next
level by enabling auto assist to ensure adherence to
business procedures and even complete actions on
behalf of your agents.
Read about Configuring auto
assist.

Watch a quick
demo of auto assist and procedures.
Read how to create and manage
procedures.







Week 3: Launch your AI agents

Why this step? When people think of AI, they often think of bots,
which we call AI agents, first. Since you've already optimized your
knowledge base (see Week 0), these AI agents will pull in the most
accurate data from that knowledge base when responding to customers
on your behalf. AI agents are included in Zendesk Suite.


Week 3, Day 1: Launch your AI agents

Launch your AI agents in just a few steps, without any
training required.

With generative
replies, AI agents use knowledge from your
existing help center to quickly craft accurate,
conversational responses to your customers'
questions. This helps automate repetitive requests,
enhancing your CX and freeing up your teams to focus
on more sensitive or complex tasks. To get
started:

Name your AI agent and choose
its tone of voice.

Connect your brand and
knowledge base.

Create and test your AI
agent. Then you're ready to publish it and start
automating.






Week 3, Day 2: Set up AI agent personas

Set up AI agent personas to
ensure your generative replies are consistently representing
your brand's voice and tone.
To set up personas



Make sure your AI agents are a
direct reflection of your brand and are delivered
in a consistent tone with AI agent personas. There
are two key components of personas: tone of voice
and business profile.

Tone of voice. You already
chose a tone of voice when setting up your AI
agent. You can change this setting at any
time.

Business profile. Guide your
AI agent responses by populating the business
profile to ensure it understands your business and
its purpose.


(Optional) Adjust reply length
to specify if you'd like your AI agent to keep
responses snappy, or if you prefer a longer
response.





Week 3, Day 3: Fill in knowledge gaps



Fill in
knowledge gaps. With time, new
questions will pop up from your customers. Discover
which common requests are not successfully resolved
by your AI agent, and enhance your knowledge base or
AI agent responses to fill in any gaps.




Week 3, Days 4 and 5: Track progress and learn more



Track progress. Analyze your automated
resolutions data, and check in with your
team to see how AI agents are improving their
workday as a front line defense.

Learn more. The AI agent you've
launched in trial is designed to help you instantly
start automating customer requests using
cutting-edge generative AI technology. If you're
interested in additional customization and more
advanced use cases, like enabling your AI agent to
fully automate complex tasks, check out our AI agents –
Advanced offering.





Week 4: AI dashboards and crafting your pitch

Why this step? Zendesk's AI-powered dashboards and reporting tools
provide you with actionable insights to measure the effectiveness of
this trial now – and in the future, to continue automatically
analyzing customer interaction data, identifying performance trends,
predicting potential bottlenecks, and offering predictive analytics
that enable more strategic decision-making and continuous
improvement of customer support operations.


Week 4, Day 1: Evaluate your trial

Now is the time to measure your trial's success and communicate
that success with key stakeholders. Compare your KPIs and
stakeholder goals to your quantitative trial data and your
team's qualitative experience. You can leverage these
dashboards:


Review the intelligent triage
dashboard.

Review the Generative AI Agent
Tools dashboard.

Watch
Gen AI Agent
tools.



Review your automated
resolutions data to track deflections
with AI agents.




Week 4, Days 2 to 5: Prepare and present your pitch

Prepare and present your pitch to key stakeholders and
cross-functional partners.


Utilize our best practices to build
your pitch to key stakeholders:

Highlight metrics from the
trial in comparison to your stakeholder
goals.

Introduce anecdotal feedback
from your agents, highlighting specific
quotes.

Show metrics and feedback
that your stakeholders didn't initially
consider.

Leave them with your list of
goals for Copilot if you were to
purchase.

Ask them for any questions to
consider when deciding to convert.



Customer stories. See how others are
using Copilot to provide better customer
service with AI. Check out our customer stories and
filter to find one that matches your company's use
case as further validation for your pitch.

Future proof. Remind stakeholders that
this trial was meant to give you a taste of the
power of Copilot, but there is so much more you can
do. Check out other features, like setting up
shortcuts, additional copilot
features, and our AI agents –
Advanced add-on for example.





Week 5: Wrap up

Take one last look at your data in comparison to your goals.
Export any final metrics you may need in making your pitch to
stakeholders.
Your trial ends after 30 days. We hope you had a great trial experience
and that AI has made your work day easier, whether it's optimizing
workflows, boosting agent efficiency, or deflecting customer
requests. To purchase Copilot, see Buying the Copilot
add-on.


{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8726057566746",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8726057566746",
"headline": "Recommendations for navigating your Copilot trial",
"description": "This article guides you through a structured five-week trial process to implement and evaluate AI-powered customer support features, including intelligent triage, agent assistance, AI agents, and performance dashboards, to optimize support operations and measure impact.",
"articleSection": "Getting started with Zendesk AI",
"datePublished": "2025-01-16T20:15:04+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-06-10T21:44:17.536296+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8726057566746"