Microsoft launches the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform

Microsoft is introducing the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, an open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solution designed to deliver seamless customer journeys.

With the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, contact centers are equipped with modern digital tools to engage customers across voice, video, and other digital engagement channels—powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and the newest member of the Microsoft family, Nuance.

The platform brings together a comprehensive yet flexible solution for contact centers, delivering best-in-class AI that powers self-service experiences, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities, according to the company. 

The addition of Nuance brings a new level of conversational AI, security, and automation to the contact center. This gives both customers and agents tools to resolve issues faster and with more personalized service, thus reducing resolution times while improving customer satisfaction. It also enables contact centers to offer targeted incentives to build brand loyalty and upsell opportunities to boost revenue.

The open nature of this platform enables companies to build on what they already have and easily add any combination of capabilities they need to take their contact center to the next level.

It integrates with a variety of contact center infrastructures and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Companies can start small or go big, on their terms, and add capabilities at the right time.

Microsoft is partnering with leaders in contact center infrastructure—including Accenture–Avanade, Avaya, Genesys, HCL, NICE, and TTEC—to ensure interoperability and compatibility with contact center systems and components companies use or plan to implement now and in the future.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform makes it easy to meet consumers in the channels they use every day—from voice to digital messaging—with secure and protected interactions. With the platform, companies can:

• Resolve customer needs quickly and easily with customer self-service and automation, enabling scale through automation of repeatable tasks as well as sophisticated transactions.
• Intelligently connect customers to virtual and live agents with the best-suited skills, experience, capacity, and availability, and provide agents with AI-powered recommendations.
• Deliver hyper-personalized omnichannel service across voice and digital engagement channels, including support for major social messaging platforms. Provide richer service engagement with Teams voice and video embedded within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform uses AI and deep analytics to anticipate customer requests, predict intent, and provide rapid resolution, which streamlines service and increases satisfaction. Customer experiences are protected with integrated biometric identification, authentication, and fraud prevention to build and maintain brand trust. The platform:

• Uses biometric authentication to authenticate customers in seconds based on inherent biometrics and other factors.
• Secures every customer and employee interaction, and prevents fraud while uncovering fraud patterns and attack vectors.
• Provides insights on how consumers interact with the brand throughout their journey with customer journey analytics to improve customer acquisition and tailor personalized offers.
• Understands why customers are calling and customizes the experience to anticipate their needs with AI intent prediction.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform empowers agents to better serve customers by bringing the right information, people, and insights directly into the flow of work with Context IQ. It provides intelligent next-best response recommendations and sentiment analysis to enable fast resolutions. What’s more, this creates a learning loop so automated solutions continually evolve and become smarter. The platform:

• Provides agents with a 360-degree view of the customer and their journey. Agents can manage customer requests seamlessly from any channel, even while handling multiple sessions at the same time.
• Empowers agents with personalized conversational intelligence, including sentiment analysis, to truly understand customer emotions and needs. Next-best response and offer recommendations help create valuable upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Assists the agent in identifying the resolution with AI-recommended knowledge articles.
• Automates how agents quickly and efficiently bring together experts to resolve an open case through intelligent case swarming. With a single click, agents can collaborate with experts matched based on skillset and expertise.

The platform is also cloud-scale and elastic to accommodate seasonal or surging demand. It automatically adjusts to changes in contact volume, agent counts, wait times, and service levels without performance impact.

For more information about this news, visit https://dynamics.microsoft.com.