Bandwidth is launching AIBridge in partnership with Google and Cognigy to integrate artificial intelligence with contact centres.
AIBridge is the latest in a series of pre-built integrations available with Bandwidth Maestro,
the company’s next-generation enterprise cloud communications platform released earlier this year.
It enables organisations to deploy voice-based AI tools into their contact centres, resulting in faster and more efficient call resolutions, improved customer experiences, and reduced costs.
John Bell, Chief Product Officer at Bandwidth, commented on the launch of AIBridge:
“Bandwidth AIBridge enables enterprises to make the transition from traditional IVR technologies to full-service conversational AI bot platforms, and move them in front of the contact centre to operate 24/7/365.
“It gets even better: using Bandwidth Visual Builder, there’s no software coding necessary to compose and connect complex call flows for any contact centre use case.”
Using AIBridge, incoming calls can be routed directly to an AI-powered virtual agent using a pre-built integration with the Maestro platform.
Issues such as replacing a lost credit card or rebooking a flight can be resolved through conversational AI, which means the call can be completed within the communications cloud, without requiring any input from a contact centre agent.
Virtual agents and self-service agents can, therefore, enable organisations to always keep their customer service lines open, even if live agents are unavailable.
Gartner predicts there are significant cost-savings to be had with AI innovations such as this.
In a market trend analysis carried out in June 2022, Gartner concluded:
“Conversational AI will reduce contact centre agent labour costs by $80 billion in 2026, increasing to $240 billion by 2031.
“In 2031, conversational AI chatbots and virtual assistants will handle 30 percent of interactions that would have otherwise been handled by a human agent, up from just two percent in 2022.”
Cognigy.AI and Dialogflow
AIBridge’s first integrations include Cognigy and Google Cloud’s Dialogflow, both of which were recognised as leaders in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms 2023.
Cognigy.AI is Cognigy’s conversational AI platform that offers best-of-breed conversational and generative AI solutions for contact centres to automate customer journeys, increase customer and agent engagement, and grow the number of first-call resolutions.
Hardy Myers, SVP of Business Development and Strategy at Cognigy, spoke about the benefits of combining its own AI with Maestro:
“Bandwidth Maestro is truly an innovative enterprise-class voice platform that, when paired with Cognigy.AI, will make conversational and generative AI more accessible and manageable enabling accelerated customer service transformation.”
Dialogflow is a feature of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI solution and enables customers to rapidly create advanced virtual agents that can switch between topics, answer additional questions, and operate continuously over multiple channels to reduce live agent calls.
Yariv Adan, Sr. AI Director, Product Management, Google Cloud AI, remarked on the new partnership: “AI is transforming the customer service experience, and we’re excited to partner with Bandwidth to bring its customers rich, intuitive customer conversations with the help of Google Cloud’s conversational AI technology.”
These integrations are pre-built on the Maestro platform, which means they can raise the IT development time from months to hours, according to Bandwidth.
Moreover, companies can orchestrate complex call flows via the Bandwidth Visual Builder, a low code/no code drag-and-drop call flow designer.
The cloud communications company calls Maestro a “first-of-its-kind, next-generation enterprise cloud communications platform” that gives IT teams the ability to integrate the best apps for unified communications, cloud contact centres, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Previously, companies would often be forced to choose been having a better contact centre platform or a better unified communications platform, for example.
Maestro is now offering its open, platform-agnostic approach in more than 65 countries, providing a technological bridge for companies that want to use the best available solutions across multiple areas.
