The next big opportunity: How to keep your people

Over 80% of employers believe that employee service should be and is an important part of their success, according to trends being tracked by customer service platform Zendesk. And this is where companies' next big opportunity really is, believes Chris Donato, the Chief Revenue Officer of Zendesk.

"It's hard to have great service without great people. But in that same trend survey, and in some of the feedback that we've seen, more than 70% of employees believe they get better service as customers than as employees."

Speaking on the sidelines at Zendesk Showcase in Sydney towards the end of June, Donato said there are two main reasons for employee experience still lagging so far behind customer experience. One is that employee service or employee experience is still an afterthought for many companies. Another is a high level of technical debt.

By that, he means a deficit in technology. Instead of having access to tools and data that could make employees' work easier, people, he thinks, are too frequently struggling with legacy tech that is more like a time-consuming burden. And this, he said, is a potential problem.

"The world we are living in is very much a loyalty economy, whether you're on the customer side or on the employee side."

Can AI help fix this problem?

Yes, Donato said - the trick is to use AI to automate routine, low-level requests, which if done correctly should have a threefold effect: reducing workload, moving talent up to work on more pressing issues, and ensuring that the human touch remains for higher-level tasks.

"The big opportunity for any company now is to make sure that they really keep their talent," he said. "The world we live in has a lot of opportunities around data and the ability to access data and leverage data in the right way to solve problems, and that's an external customer point of view, as well as an internal employee point of view."

Automation and correct leveraging of data, he believes, will allow organisations to be more productive, but it will also help to drive a different level of employee satisfaction and retention. Part of this is job satisfaction from adjustments to workload and role; part of it is the level of self-service and personalisation that automation allows; and part of it is that the technology also empowers managers and leadership, enabling them to do a better job of directing teams and performance.

"Employee service is everybody's responsibility," he added. "It's the CIO, it's the COO, it's the CFO, it's the head of HR."

And how do we convince the C-suite to take that up? Just point to the cost of replacing people who leave, he said.

"I think part of the challenge in the market is when you're bringing outside talent in, they don't know your business. They don't understand where those data points are in your business. And that just puts another level of emphasis on making sure that we keep our talent and empower that talent to work on the toughest problems and drive a different level of outcomes for our business. That will reduce some of the exposure and risk you have from a recruiting standpoint."

Photo: Chris Donato at Zendesk Showcase Sydney 2025.