Big CX News from AWS, Salesforce, Zoom, Zendesk & Oracle

Popular stories from the last week that you may have missed.

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Published: October 11, 2024

Rhys Fisher

The past week in CX has seen a combined contact center offering from AWS and Salesforce, Zoomtopia updates, an AI Agent Builder from Zendesk, and some bullish comments from Oracle’s VP of CX.

Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.

AWS Introduces the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect

AWS has teased a preview of a new CX offering: the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect.

The solution embeds channels from Amazon Connect within Salesforce Service Cloud.

So, instead of integrating two separate platforms, businesses can leverage a unified offering for CCaaS and CRM.

Excited to share more, Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, posted on LinkedIn: “The upcoming preview of Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect takes our partnership to new heights.

This groundbreaking offering will natively integrate digital channels like chat, SMS, video, and web calling, alongside voice capabilities, directly into the Salesforce CRM interface, providing agents with a unified and streamlined experience.

Expect this offering to evolve, as AWS could later embed several other tools from Amazon Connect into Service Cloud and further extend its capabilities. Those may include Connect’s case management, workforce optimization (WFO), and reporting solutions.

Nevertheless, this announcement already provides several tangible benefits, especially for Salesforce-centric businesses leveraging Data Cloud, the CRM leader’s customer data platform (CDP) (Read on…).

Zoom Drops a Mega Virtual Agent Upgrade, Gives Its Contact Center a GenAI Makeover

Zoomtopia 2024 has set the stage for the “next-generation” Zoom Virtual Agent.

From December, the solution will detect when a customer query contains multiple intents and go through each in a single session.

Moreover, the Zoom Virtual Agent may isolate occasions when customers change their intent midway through an interaction and pivot with them.

Before the end of the year, Zoom also promises to introduce an AI Virtual Voice Agent, extending these capabilities to voice.

Yet, even on digital channels, the new features will likely help businesses automate many more complex, multi-faceted conversations.

In doing so, Zoom customers may develop more sophisticated self-service experiences, bolster their containment rates, and limit escalations.

To further lower interaction costs, businesses may utilize several other existing features within the Zoom Virtual Agent. For instance, they may take the opportunity to leverage LLMs that pick from trusted knowledge sources, so the bot converses with customers without prior training (Read on…).

Zendesk Launches an AI Agent Builder, Enhances Its Agent Copilot

Zendesk has introduced an AI Agent Builder as part of a massive release wave across its platform.

The solution allows customer service teams to build bots – or “AI Agents” as Zendesk now terms them – through natural language descriptions.

For instance, a user may type into the AI Agent Builder: “A customer wants to return a product.”

With this simple command, the solution will recognize the scenario and develop an AI Agent framework, which the user can review, test, and deploy.

In this example, that framework will contain steps like checking the order number, verifying which items the customer wants to return, and cross-referencing the return policy.

Yet, as Matthias Goehler, CTO for EMEA at Zendesk, told CX Today: “You can define any number of workflows in the same way.

What’s great is that business users can handle this without needing to design complex flowcharts or decision logic.

Still, developers may need to reference an API when devising AI Agents that cross multiple third-party applications (Read on…).

Oracle Pledges to Automate ALL Customer Service, Bolsters Oracle Fusion Cloud Service

Oracle has committed to helping its customers automate ALL of their customer service operations.

Jeff Wartgow, VP of Oracle CX, made the assertion during a media briefing, where he shared the vendor’s vision for “complete, total, perpetual service automation.”

According to Wartgow, Oracle views automation as critical to helping companies meet the demands of modern customers.

Also, he suggests automation tools from Oracle are 96 percent cheaper than human agents, scalable, “don’t eat”, “don’t sleep”, and speak multiple languages, making it an obvious decision to push towards service automation.

“We are looking at, quite literally, creating processes that automate all your customer service,” he explained.

Let the robots take care of it all.

With so many vendors tiptoeing around the use of AI in customer service, the VP’s bluntness stands out (Read on…).

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