Still Measuring Tickets Like It’s 2012? Zendesk Says Grow Up

This week on Funnel Frontier: Low handle time? Cute. Zendesk claims AHT is irrelevant and resolution is the only metric that matters in 2025.

This week:

• Still measuring tickets like it’s 2012? Zendesk says grow up
• HubSpot’s founder just declared the decade of AI agents

Stat of the Week

75% of organizations using CRM have experienced significant improvements in customer satisfaction. (CRM.org)

Still measuring tickets like it’s 2012? Zendesk says grow up

Still counting tickets and measuring handle time like it’s a leaderboard from 2012? Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott thinks it’s time to grow up.

In an interview with CX Today, he made it plain: resolution is the metric that matters.Doesn’t matter if it’s a chatbot, call, or carrier pigeon—if it fixes the issue, it counts.

“A successful outcome for our customers is just having their issues resolved.”

That’s why Zendesk is shifting from seat-based pricing to outcome-based pricing. No more paying for the number of users. You’re paying for answers only.

AI breaks the old scoreboard

If AI agents respond instantly and never get tired, then metrics like “time to first response” and “handle time” become kind of... silly. As McDermott puts it:

“It’s basically free to have AI talk to your user as long as they’re enjoying it.”

That doesn’t mean humans are out. It means agents get rerouted to higher-value stuff—VIP cases, escalations, and moments that actually need empathy. The bots handle the grunt work and humans deliver the finesse.

Unification kills the chaos

The real bottleneck? Frankenstein tech stacks.

“If I’m using a different tool for email than voice, it becomes jarringly obvious to the customer.”

Disconnected systems mean agents have to juggle tabs just to get context—if they can get it at all. Customers get passed around, repeat themselves, and feel like they’re talking to three different companies.

Zendesk’s pitch: unify everything—email, chat, voice, AI, analytics—into one platform. Less duct tape, fewer silos, faster training, and better resolution. Just ask Lush, which hit 60% AI resolution after going live in under a week.

What CX leaders should be tracking

Zendesk’s bet is clear:

• Resolution rate
• Time to resolution
• AI-human collaboration
• Real-time sentiment
• How fast can you go live and show ROI?

Because when only 25% of tickets are truly high-value, AI should eat the rest—while your agents focus on doing what bots can’t: being human.

And that’s a CX metric worth tracking.

The Week @ CRM.org

Sales CRM. Find your way back to earthly revenue growth: 2025’s tops in a crowded market. 

CRM for Small Business. Just because your office space is tiny doesn’t mean your customer relationships should be, too.

Weekly Bloom 

The Benefits of Reading Fiction in a Digital Age. So many stimuli, so little time. Yet it turns out peeping ol’ fashioned fiction-diction has practical benefits (as well as airy abstract ones).

HubSpot’s founder just declared the decade of AI agents

Last year, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah told INBOUND 2024 that 2024 was the year of AI agents.

At INBOUND 2025, he corrected himself:

"I predicted that this year would be the year of AI agents. I was wrong. This is not the year of AI agents, this is the decade of AI agents."

His Agent.ai project now has over 2 million users, up from just 47,000 a year ago. Over 26,000 have built agents from scratch, and 1,800 of those bots are shared with the whole community.

All without logging into HubSpot. Seriously. You don’t need to be a customer. You don’t even need to pretend to be one.

Wait, what was Agent.ai again?

If you’ve been playing in the AI sandbox this past year, you’ve probably seen it. But here’s your refresher:

Agent.ai is a free, open agent network for CX teams built by Shah, but not yet part of HubSpot.

It lets anyone build and share autonomous AI agents for sales, marketing, service, and ops. You can:

• Browse ready-made agents
• Build your own with low-code tools
• Plug in your own knowledge sources
• Deploy them anywhere you work

Think of it as Shah’s personal AI skunkworks and his real-time test bed for what could become part of the HubSpot stack.

Meanwhile, HubSpot’s pushing Breeze Agents

While Agent.ai runs wild, HubSpot’s official agent lineup—Breeze Agents—is growing fast.

At INBOUND 2025, they dropped 18 new ones (in beta), joining the 15 they’d already launched. These are pre-configured AI agents that automate things like prospecting, customer research, and support tasks.

It’s a different audience: Agent.ai is for tinkerers. Breeze is for busy teams who just want to plug and go.

But the two aren’t disconnected. Shah hinted that Agent.ai usage might help inform what Breeze Agents get built next.

From solo hacks to team habits: meet TEAM

Shah didn’t just show off growth. He shared a framework for scaling AI adoption inside companies.

It’s called TEAM:

• Triage → List use cases, prioritize the ones with low risk and high reward
• Experiment → Prompt, test, iterate, learn
• Automate → When something works, build a workflow or agent around it
• Measure → Track real outcomes, not vibes

It’s a simple model for moving from individual prompt heroes to full-on team automation.

And it quietly positions Agent.ai as the on-ramp—not just to AI adoption, but to HubSpot itself. Because when 2 million people start using your side project, it doesn’t stay on the side for long.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Amazon Starts Providing Customer Support in Sign Language. Amazon now offers real-time French Sign Language (LSF) interpretation via video, improving accessibility for 200,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing users in France. Full coverage and support for French Cued Speech is planned by October 2025.

Salesforce Teases Agentforce Builder, Expands AI Agent Stack. Agentforce Builder will let teams create custom AI agents without code, complete with rules, skills, and data connections. Salesforce also added agent scheduling, Slack integrations, and embedded agents in Service Cloud.

Cisco Deploys 15,000-Seat Contact Center Across 150 Sites. Cisco rolled out one of its largest contact centers yet—15,000 seats across 150 locations—using its Webex Contact Center platform. The project shows Cisco’s ability to support large, distributed customer service teams on a single cloud platform.

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