Microsoft has thrown its weighty hat into the contact center technology ring, announcing a CCaaS solution that combines Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, Power, Azure, and Nuance AI capabilities.
After testing the CCaaS water with a half-baked Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service solution and numerous Teams integrations with prominent CCaaS players, the enterprise technology pioneer has now dived much deeper into the space.
Indeed, the renowned technology vendor has caused quite the splash, as the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform includes a whole host of features, such as:
- Omnichannel engagement, including voice, digital messaging, and social channels
- Intelligent self-service with embedded automation capabilities
- Virtual agents responding to customer queries and supporting agents
- Biometric authentication
- Customer journey analytics
- AI intent predictions
- Next-best response recommendations
- Sentiment analysis through conversational intelligence
- AI-recommended knowledge articles
- "Intelligent case swarming" that allows agents to collaborate and solve complex cases
- Dynamic, real-time discounts and personalized offer recommendations
- Predictive targeting tools for sales teams
- Proactive outreach to pre-emptively notify customers of promos, updates, and events
By bringing all these capabilities together, Microsoft hopes to “drive infrastructure simplicity, flexibility, and innovation” while removing tricky IT integrations.
Digging deeper in a blog post, Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform at Microsoft, wrote:
Contact center tasks and workflows ranging in complexity from routine conversations to sophisticated transactions can easily be automated using no-code, low-code, or pro-code experiences.
Yet, the solution goes further in automating entire contacts, offering chatbots that can converse intelligently with customers across various channels.
It is also easy to scale, accommodating surges in demand that operations often experience during particular seasons or moments within the year. It even adjusts automatically to changes in contact volumes, headcount, and service level to make this much more manageable.
However, Microsoft is far from a lone wolf in its latest venture, offering integrations to CCaaS stalwarts such as Genesys, NICE, and Avaya to ensure companies can build an ecosystem that meets their needs.
Building on this point, Lamanna stated: