Regarding upcoming changes to Answerbot and Flow Builder

I can't understand why you make changes that may be good for you and very bad for your customers,1000 MAUs are you serious about that can see the huge numbers that we are trying to serve and instead of helping us you made things worst, keeping the same bot is better than this awful decision, and this should be part of improving progress to AI world not to pay more, was thinking of enterprise I know I will pay more but now after seeing these things I will keep on Profesional plan, I'll obviously be turning off Article Suggestions  I was excited about AI events and changes but now I'm not anymore.

We have the same, we used Answer Bot before, and our technology isn´t that easy with repetitive processes. Answer Bot may fix 1-2% of our cases, which was OK enough with available free solutions.

Our MAU Usage in May is already after 10 days on 1000+, which means we need to buy extra content, but there is no effect of saving Agents, as the recommendation isn´t good enough, and we still need to work on the case.

Now we found out we also need an AI Plus license (50$ per Agent) to get Chat GPT benefits on TOP, so Zendesk charges 3 times (License, AI license, MAU). This is absolutely unacceptable.

Also, I don´t find any way to use a "Messaging / Chat" license to combine our own Chat GPT API.

We will delete all Recommendations and start to build our own Widget to ChatGPT now, and Zendesk API doesn´t support this.

/Tobias

@tobias12 check out https://yuma.ai/. You can remove all of Zendesk's "AI" with this tool.

Dear @jonathan12,

Since 2021 you have invested “slowly” in flow builder and made “insufficient” progresses - in fact as of May 2023 the product is far behind the competition and far from being mature enough to start charging for it.

We had to stop our organisation to migrate from Chat to Messaging with flow builder for a simple reason: the product has fundamental deficiencies and it wasn’t and isn’t complete just yet.

As we are desperately waiting every day for every new updates to Messaging and bots (ie the recently addition of talk to messaging, amongst other things), to make the product suitable for our company, I find out about this new pricing module: MAU. 

So said in other words let’s start over charging first the feature, then we will figure it out what is missing. Great pricing strategy!

For a company like our, that is pursuing the switch to messaging and bots and want to use all the build in functionalities that Zendesk offers, in order not to use competitors, the limit of 1,000 is not just simply ridiculous, it is out of the market, and the benchmark you used is taken by extremely low volume interactions organisation (or forgive me invented).

Now you have the option to make it right and adjust the figure on 1,000, that is completely insignificant, or reinvent the pricing model, as it stands is immensely overpriced.

Respectfully 

Is there a way for admins to see how MAUs have been used over the past month, both by brands and by channels? I just thought that seeing only the current month wouldn't be very helpful.

We originally rolled out the answer bot in 2021 and had to deactivate it due to the influx in negative feedback from our customers.

Since then, Zendesk has focused a lot of improvement on the Agent Workspace and their AI. We've been monitoring Zendesk advancements in the flow builder and answer bot and despite some cons, we have been making our own updates to move back to answer bot. 

With this change we will not be switching to answer bot. We may even disable autoreply during our peak season. Autoreply has helped us, but it does not make enough impact to resolve customer issues to justify paying for. 

• The 1,000 MAU limit seems relatively low. When we began planning for this change, one of the things we considered was current usage. We wanted to find a limit that would allow a majority of customers to use the tool without significant price increases. It would also allow us to invest in much more advanced functionality for users who wanted to make Flow Builder a primary part of their service strategy.  We found that a large percentage of our accounts fell below 1,000 MAU, which is how we landed on this threshold. 

This is probably because Zendesk's bot was inferior compared to its competitors, and therefore not many existing ZD clients were using it to its full potential. The only other reason I can think of is the current client base of ZD have small businesses. How else can you come to the average 1k? 

Surely you should offer more to those paying for the more expensive plans?

You will find if you extend your research outside of ZD that 1k is nothing. Other companies are offering 5 times that amount and only on the bot conversation, along with double the reloading for the same price.

I love zendesk but with the increasing amount of competition out there, the decision becomes difficult to justify as to why you would willingly pay more when you don't see any benefit coming from it.

We're on Enterprise plan and don't use the Article recommendations feature because Ukrainian language is not supported. So we use Zendesk bots for greetings and routing mostly. And have to pay for such features? 🤯

We have been discussing the move to MAU with our sales rep. He mentioned something along the lines of because we do not Authenticate our users, we would need 3 MAU for each user? Meaning, that we would need Triple the Amount of MAU as active users we see interacting with our bot's?

Is this valid information? 

What also doesn't make sense is that the amount of MAU is based on the account and not brands your serve. 

Being multiband under one account still gives you 1k, but If I split the accounts I'll get 1k each account?

As you have said, MAUs when used in Team and MAUs when used in Enterprise are
I think there is a big difference.
I signed a contract last year without having this change explained to me by the sales person in charge.
I am dissatisfied with the MAU values.

I hope that the appropriate MAU limit will be changed in the Enterprise contract.

The 1,000 MAU limit is definitely low. In my opinion, there should be an intermediate limit for the Pro and Enterprise plans.

Hi there

First of all, i appreciate the chance to be heard, by you Jonathan. A way of contacting us in the community is one of the reasons why i enjoy zendesk!

But. I do unfortunately think that Zendesk have been shooting way off on this part. Having only 1000 MAU will still be to low for a small customer service. We receive something between 8000 to 12000 tickets per month. Converting that to MAU's would be way above the maximum amount of 1000.

We have been looking at implementing the bot next month, and will still do it for testing. But if the MAU isn't raised significant, i do not see any point of using the Zendesk bot. We are on a PRO edition, and i would expect that to be around 10.000 MAU's and between 20.0000 and 40.000 MAU for Enterprise.

These numbers are mainly based on what i see from other comments regarding this, and not based on my own numbers. But i will update the post, when we launch the bot and have tested it for a month.

I really do appreciate that you guys are reaching out for us, and i really hope that you aren't just doing it, so that "you have done something", but because you are actually hearing us out, and plan on adjust the current plan to something that makes sense.

Thank you for creating a wonderful platform. I hope you continue to improve it, and in the right direction. Unfortunately this plan isn't, at the moment.

Thanks!

Hi Jonathan,

As everyone has mentioned previously, I too strongly agree that 1000 MAU is completely unacceptable. And what's worst is the whole timing of it. I just got invited for AI Conversational Lunch by Zendesk to discuss more on the future of AI in CX, but at the same time, you are increasing the prices by adding a lot of additional charges. Starting of with the USD50 per agent for advanced AI, which itself seems unfair. As we are not using several AI's. We are only using 1 AI across the department, and I have worked with other platforms that also provide Advanced AI at no additional cost. And now a limit of only 1000 MAU, whereas our current MAU ranges from 3000 to 8000 depending on seasons. Again, I have used other platforms that does not have any limit for MAU.

You also mentioned that when Flow Builder was first announced with messaging in 2021, it was communicated that it would be unmetered for some time. As with others in this conversation, I was not able to find any article or documentations that mentions this. I would really appreciate if you can share the link at the soonest as it has been some time with no further response from your side as well.

Thank you.

I am really crossing my fingers that the Zendesk Team reacts to all this super valid feedback very soon. Honestly I am just shocked. We have been wanting to switch to messaging for quiet some time now, always held back by limitations of the product functionality (eg. inaccuracy of translations/horrible effect on page speed when we set it live for testing or tried it on a staging site/limitations to customize wording of bot messages which has recently been improved, but out of the above was actually our smallest concern....) 

Now I was out of the office for over a month. My teamlead had planned to do the switch from web widget classic to messaging while i was OOO (as we finally built a flow that seems it could really work), unbelievable but true we need a little support from our Dev Team due to the customized icon we need on our sites - and now I return to the office, finding out that (a) the switch again wasn't possible as there were technical issues with the custom button display (b) my teamlead reported this in ZD Admin Support, again ending up in a frustrating loop of questions that did not lead to any solution. Our Devs have strictly followed ALL STEPS of the documentation on the topic "hide icon and instead display our own" and it just continues not to work as described. This should be a super basic feature, especially for a product that you are looking to start charging for like this.

In addition to the sad news that we still couldn't do the switch from classic to messaging due to technical issues (I was really looking forward to test our first built flow/bot in live with customers online), and hearing that our plan price/month has increased significantly per agent/month in general - I now read about this announcement. Earlier this year we decided to not consider working with a third party for now in regards to messaging/ai-automations - as we believed in all the great promises made by ZD about the technical improvements during Q1/Q2 this year. 

I am lost for words, how disappointing this general topic has been for us as of today, I am almost afraid to invest any more time into learning what's possible with ZD messaging/bots when it ends up possibly creating unreasonable extra cost so soon .... just wanting to add my name and some honest thoughts here in general on the whole topic of the entire product "messaging" (should mention that we are a multi-brand and multi-language Enterprise Customer, maybe companies that provide US english speaking service only, or just one-two languages in total, struggle less with the general functionality). 

If anyone here is using messaging succesfully for a multi-brand/multi-language account and would like to share a website that this product works on in more than one language, I would be super grateful if you could share a link to your site. I am currently starting to believe that we may be better of considering a third party provider for messaging/bot projects after all. 

Really hope we can ultimately end up with ZD being our "one-in-all-solution" (that we hoped for it to be when we made the switch from our old system almost 2 years ago) but will have to wait for a new announcement about this pricing model - and hope on my last try to reach out to ZD Admin Support about our technical issues on going live with the messaging widget, I will find proper help. 

Not giving up just yet :) but really really really hope there will be good updates here soon. 

Commenting again as it is now July and we have not seen any feedback from Zendesk for all of the companies/Zendesk customers who have provided valuable feedback. When can we expect an update? 

I don't think Zendesk has any intention of listening to their customers seeing how silent they have been about this. Not a single reply or update being provided.

I guess it is high time that we look into better alternatives that actually listens to their customers and do something about it, and not try and monetize every single feature.

Our company initially implemented the Answer Bot feature in 2021, but we were forced to turn it off due to a substantial amount of unfavorable feedback from our clientele.

Zendesk, in the meantime, has been concentrating on enhancing the Agent Workspace and its artificial intelligence capabilities. We've been keeping a close eye on the progress made by Zendesk in the development of the Flow Builder and Answer Bot. Despite a few drawbacks, we have been making our own modifications with the intent of reintegrating the Answer Bot.

However, despite these adjustments, we have decided not to revert back to using the Answer Bot. We might even consider turning off the autoreply function during our busiest times. While the autoreply feature has provided us with some benefits, it hasn't been sufficiently effective in addressing customer problems to warrant the cost associated with it.

In the meantime, Zendesk has devoted substantial resources to enhancing the Agent Workspace and its AI technology. We've been carefully observing the progress made in Zendesk's flow builder and the answer bot. Despite some disadvantages, we've been progressively implementing updates with the aim of reintegrating the answer bot.

However, with the current developments, we've decided not to transition back to using the answer bot. We might even consider disabling the autoreply feature during our busiest times. Even though the autoreply feature has been beneficial to us, its effectiveness in resolving customer problems hasn't been sufficient to warrant the cost.

We just implemented autoreplies and already have over 800 MAU in 7 days! How is it even possible to manage 1000 MAU with Article Recommendations and the Flow Builder on top?! 
Is there a way we can see the daily usage of MAU, to assess how adjustments affect the # of MAU?
Also I agree with everyone here! 1000 MAU is way too low and not acceptable! 

Hi Everyone,

It has been a while since I've commented, so I apologize for the gap in communications. I'd like to provide a quick update to everyone here.

The Zendesk Bots team and I have been keeping track of and reviewing your comments and we've also been having some fruitful and open discussions with customers who have reached out to us directly on other channels.

While we're not currently ready to announce specific changes and updates here today, I'd like everyone to know that we are investigating our options and will likely make some changes here based on your strong and consistent feedback.

I expect to update the community again with a post here in the next 2-3 weeks with additional details.

As always, we both appreciate and encourage your continued engagement and feedback with us on topics like this. Please keep the feedback coming.

Thank You,

Jon Aniano

+1 to the concerns that 1,000 MAU is too low as a baseline for this feature.

Hello Zendesk Community!

As always, I wanted to thank all of you for your feedback here in the community. I appreciate your candor, your detailed replies and your transparency with us as your trusted CX partner.

We've listened to your feedback here and all of the additional feedback that customers have provided to us in the last few months. 

We have decided to revisit our plan for bot usage pricing in light of major enhancements we've made to Zendesk Bots, Zendesk AI and to the broader Zendesk platform this year. We will not be enforcing the current plan for MAU-based bot pricing this year.

We plan to update our approach here and will aim for pricing that is specifically aligned with the value created in your specific bot deployments. As we determine the next steps here, we will release broader communications to Zendesk customers through our various customer communication channels and I will also make sure this thread is updated with links to any new information that we publish.

Thank You,

Jon Aniano

Hi @jonathan12. Happy to hear these changes will not be enforced this year. We also hope that all future changes will be announced in advance given that we calculate the cost of using Zendesk solution before the contract is signed and budget this as well. That is, such significant price changes should apply to new contracts only.

Hi @jonathan12 thank you for this good news - it makes things way less complicated for us.