Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform combines Nuance, Dynamics 365, Teams, Power Virtual Agents, and Azure to address the needs of a modern contact center by engaging customers through a variety of voice, video, and other digital engagement channels.
This post is co-authored by Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, Microsoft, and was originally published on Microsoft.com on July 19, 2022.
In today’s digital world, brand reputation is synonymous with customer experience, including the quality of customer care. Consumers expect effortless, consistent, and secure experiences across any point of contact they choose—in fact, their brand perception and customer loyalty depend on it. With the stakes this high, companies need a comprehensive yet flexible solution to modernize their customer care experience.
We are thrilled to introduce the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, an open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solution designed to deliver seamless customer journeys.
Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform powered with Nuance AI, Teams, and Dynamics 365
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.
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.
We recognize that the complexity and cost of upgrading technology can hold back innovation required to transform customer service from being a cost center to becoming a revenue driver. The open nature of our 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. We are 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.
Enable omnichannel engagement and intelligent self-service
The average consumer uses multiple channels to communicate with a brand. 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.
Personalize and protect customer interactions
Consumers today expect brands to provide tailored experiences based on their engagement with the company. Delivering personalized experiences starts with using AI to identify and authenticate consumers seamlessly and securely, and requires unlocking the power of data to understand, customize, and optimize customer journeys.
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.
Improve agent productivity and modernize case management
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.
Increase customer acquisition and revenue
Rich real-time insights and analytics enable data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction, with conversational analytics providing instant visibility into trends across engagement channels. With the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, companies can:
- Enable agents to increase conversions and drive upsell through real-time offers.
- Help customers find and select products through personalized offer recommendations, driving upsell and cross-sell revenue.
- Track user behavior and data to quickly identify and offer optimal engagement opportunities through predictive targeting, thereby improving satisfaction and increasing revenue.
- Preemptively notify customers of special promotions and updates, which accelerates their purchase intent, and boosts revenue and long-term value.
Drive infrastructure simplicity, flexibility, and innovation
The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform simplifies implementation and support of contact center infrastructure, removing complex IT integrations while maintaining flexibility for customers and partners seeking comprehensive Contact Center and Customer Engagement solutions.
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. Powerful chatbots equipped with conversational AI can be created to converse with customers intelligently and efficiently across engagement channels. Consumers can self-service a wide variety of cases, getting connected with a live agent when needed for support with complex issues.
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.
Transform the contact center with our extensive partner network
Accenture–Avanade, a customer experience (CX) transformation partner, will deliver its Customer Engagement solutions starting with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform to help customers reimagine their entire customer experience and deliver business results. Additional launch partners include systems integrators EY, HCL, Hitachi, KPMG, PwC, TCS, and TTEC, and ISVs such as Avaya, Genesys, and NICE. With this robust set of launch partners, customers around the globe will be positioned to create new and sophisticated solutions to address specific contact center challenges.
Learn more
Learn more about how to transform customer and agent experiences with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform and explore the full set of capabilities.
