Take your customer support to the next level with embedded AI applications

Customer Support and Customer Success are core business functions. They help to maintain revenues and accelerate growth. Acquiring a new customer can cost five to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. But in today's fast-paced business environment, managing CRM workflows and keeping on top of helpdesk tickets can be overwhelming.

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Luckily, artificial intelligence (AI) brings new opportunities to automate these processes and decrease manual work like data entry or retrieval. AI-powered apps leverage the power of machine learning and large language models (LLMs) to automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer requests, extract relevant information, surface information, generate replies, and enhance productivity overall. 

Not a fan of toggling between multiple internal tools and databases? We hear you. Why grow the size of your tool stack when you can embed powerful sidebar apps directly into your existing systems and processes to do more with less. Integrating directly into your customer support software allows you to automate email and ticket processing without ever leaving your inbox. Now you can even integrate AI right into your customer support and CRM tools.

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In this post, we’ll explore what embedded apps are, how they work, and the advantages they offer.

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What are embedded apps?

Integrating custom apps into your CRM or help desk solution brings a whole new level of efficiency without the hassle of switching back and forth between multiple interfaces. If you work with tools like Front, Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk, or Zoho, integrated custom apps could be for you. These apps are added directly to your software as a slick side panel embedded with an iframe, and they help you interact with data from your other tools and systems.

A familiar example of such an embedded app is a Gmail calendar that you can open in your Gmail inbox for a fast interaction with your calendar. 

If you use Zendesk or Front you’re probably familiar with embedded apps too: with just one click on a little icon on the right you can open a side panel with your calendar, contacts, shortcuts, or another custom app that you have in your library.

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Despite their compact size, embedded apps can be very powerful when connected to other systems, saving you a lot of time searching for additional information or updating data.

Adding a custom app to your customer support software (let’s say Zendesk or Front) is a powerful way to leverage all the relevant data when dealing with your customers. Wave goodbye to juggling between multiple tools and focus on delivering exceptional customer experience.

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Advantages of custom embedded apps

Using custom apps provides many advantages for customer-facing teams across industries.

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Time-saving automation

Forget about having to manually flip through multiple interfaces to check customer’s data or their payment history. Keeping all your data right inside Zendesk is a major advantage. This will help you not only delight your customers resolving their issues faster, but also keep your team happy allowing them to have all necessary data at their fingertips.

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Accelerating with AI

Another huge benefit of embedded apps is the automation of repetitive tasks with the power of integrated AI. These apps can handle time-consuming activities like extracting relevant data from emails and tickets, updating internal databases, or enriching tickets with account data such as order or payment history. Thanks to AI they can also be used to generate responses to customer inquiries, even in multiple languages. By automating these tasks, teams save countless hours.

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Reducing errors

Manual data export often leads to mistakes. And the more tools are added to the process the higher the chances for a mistake to occur. Custom apps are a great way to optimize operations while putting all necessary data at your operators’ fingertips.

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Examples of embedded apps

If you don’t have much experience with custom embedded apps in your customer support workflow, we’d like to show you a few popular solutions:

Jira app for Zendesk lets teams automate communication between support and engineering teams on development issues. The app links Zendesk support tickets directly to Jira issues helping the teams share critical information and ensure faster tickets processing. The app helps support agents to stay updated on the issues resolution and to bring the customers up to date. The engineers are able to see all customer conversations and details pertaining to the issue directly in Jira. Both teams fully collaborate without leaving their core systems.

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Another interesting example is the Shopify app for Front. The app integrates directly with Front and allows access to customer information and order details straight from the Front inbox. Shopify integrates with Front so the sales and support team can always access the needed data of their customers. Being able to see data such as orders, refunds, and addresses directly in Front saves agents a lot of time and allows them to focus on replying to customers.

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Uify custom Zendesk apps. Uify is not just an app, it’s much more than that. Uify is a low-code platform that allows you to build fully customizable apps for the customer support tool of your choice. Some of the biggest advantages of Uify are that it can connect any internal API, has multiple built-in integrations (like Salesforce, Google Sheets), and can connect several tools and databases within one app. 

On top of that Uify lets you integrate AI into any of your custom apps to automate data processing. For example, you can create an app to extract data from a customer email, enrich it with data from your internal systems, and use it to generate a reply. Think of it as your personal AI assistant.

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Let’s say you received a hotel booking request. With the Uify custom app, you’d be able to extract relevant data from the email request such as dates, destination, special requests. Then you can run an API call to your internal booking system to see the rooms available for this request. 

All of this can be easily displayed in a sidebar app in your Zendesk inbox, so you can process the request from a single space. Finally, you can send the booking request to your booking system. And the AI will even draft a reply confirming the booking to your customer.

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Ready-made vs custom built apps

Embedded apps are getting increasingly popular as companies look for ways to scale their customer support while increasing the support quality. That’s why you can see hundreds of ready-made apps on customer software marketplaces such as Zendesk marketplace or Front marketplace.

The advantage of these solutions is that you can deploy them pretty much immediately. The downside is that you can’t fully customize them. And in most cases, one size does not fit all.

These apps have a standard interface, so adding or removing fields and buttons isn’t possible. Creating a more complex workflow that would link several internal tools and databases also isn’t an option. And not being able to add an AI component? That is a big miss too.

That’s why many teams take another route - building custom embedded apps. This allows for maximum customization and creation of a tool that gives you the data you need and is shaped to fit your agents’ workflows perfectly. But there are a few drawbacks to this approach, one of the biggest being scarce engineering capacity and long development lead times, which can stretch to several months.

This is where Uify steps in. It allows you to build and deploy Zendesk, Front, or Salesforce embedded apps incredibly fast. The comprehensive library of UI components helps to create beautiful interfaces optimized for embedded apps in minutes. It significantly speeds up the development, cutting it from months to days.

Uify is a powerful platform for developing AI-powered embedded apps that seamlessly blend into the tools you already work with, such as CRMs and help desk solutions. Think of Uify as enhancing the functionality of your existing customer solution. Through accessing the customer support platform’s SDK, Uify apps fully understand the context of the underlying system you are embedding the app into.

Uify allows you to connect to your data sources and internal APIs effortlessly. You can run custom queries, make API calls, and apply JavaScript wherever required. Uify has also direct integrations with tools like Salesforce, Slack, and Google Sheets.

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Additionally, you can leverage leading AI models for data extraction, attachment processing, and creating responses to your customers in any language. This helps your team  spend less time on manual repetitive tasks and provide exceptional customer experience.

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A few other benefits of building with Uify include:

• Hosting. No need to host the embedded app yourself - deploy it to your workspace and use it. We’ll take care of scalability and maintenance.
• Tailored AI actions. Prompts and execution blocks are made to support your correspondence with customers with text-to-structured-data output (incl. validation of extracted types, etc.) and are ready to be used in APIs or DB requests.
• Granular roles & permissions. Manage users via SSO, assign granular roles, and grant permissions to control data access.
• Easy upload and deployment. Upload Uify once - iterate, make changes to your frontend, and deploy without re-upload. Changes are reflected instantaneously.

Embedded apps are revolutionizing the way we handle workflows. With their ability to automate repetitive tasks, extract relevant information, and enhance productivity, these apps help manage the ever-growing mountains of customers and their data. 

Supercharge your support team with custom AI-powered apps. No need to jump between multiple platforms or invest in complicated setups.

Start building with Uify today (it’s free to start)!