From launched AI-powered contact centre offerings to securing multiple ‘megadeals’, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Extends Its Contact Center Portfolio
Salesforce has made new automation, AI, and analytics features available for users of its Salesforce Contact Center platform.
The prominent CRM vendor has coined the first “Einstein Conversation Insights.” Essentially, this uses AI to monitor issues across the contact center – such as an outage or dissatisfied customer – and alerts the supervisor.
Next is an “Identity Verification” feature, which – as the name suggests – supports contact center agents in verifying the customer’s identity using “automated workflows.”
Its new “Action Launcher” feature also harnesses automation. In doing so, it creates common query workflows – such as prepaid top-ups or address changes – which agents can trigger to service customers faster.
The final AI addition is a “Service Availability Check” feature, which allows agents to spot what is available when a customer wants to add or change a service with a quick address search.
Summarizing each of these new capabilities, David Fan, VP and General Manager of Communications at Salesforce, said:
Salesforce’s new solutions are tailored to help providers remove inefficiencies, deliver faster service, increase productivity with AI and automation, and deepen customer engagements to provide differentiated experiences with every interaction.
Further additions include a WhatsApp integration alongside features named “Order Fulfillment Date Predictions” and “Order Delay Predictions.”
Both the latter innovations harness predictive analytics. The first recommends expected fulfilment dates. Meanwhile, the second identifies orders likely to be delayed due to issues such as an incorrect date, giving managers time to correct the information and suggest a new fulfilment date.
Five9 Launches Its First ChatGPT-Powered Contact Center Offerings
Five9 has released two new product offerings that leverage ChatGPT-3 from OpenAI: AI Insights and AI Summaries.
AI Insights combines ChatGPT-3 with real-time transcription to automatically interpret customer conversations and cluster them into categories.
In grouping contacts together – by intent or various other traits – contact centers may quickly identify opportunities for automation and process improvement.
According to Mike Burkland, Chairman & CEO of Five9, it “is the latest example of what we call practical AI.”
Meanwhile, AI Summaries supplements its agent-assist solutions by auto-summarizing interaction transcripts and publishing them in the CRM.
Thanks to the power of the OpenAI’s large language models, this offering requires “little to no” professional services or tuning – improving time to value.
Such value stems from streamlining post-contact processing for agents, shaving seconds from every customer conversation, and potentially delivering significant savings for large operations.
The innovations add two new modules to Five9’s AI and automation portfolio, which also includes speech analytics, workflow automation, and IVA solutions.
Innovations That Underline Five9’s AI Ambition
Five9 launched the solutions during a recent earnings call, where Burkland noted continuous AI innovation as mission-critical to Five9’s continued growth.
ChatGPT will seemingly fuel much of this innovation. Indeed, Burkland stated:
We believe that AI and automation are at the core of the modern contact center. And generative AI, with the large language models, is game-changing.
Yet, before the truly “game-changing” innovation happens, ChatGPT may offer more quick wins in custom data charting, trending, and routing.
NICE Secures Multiple $10MN+ CCaaS Megadeals
Despite the challenging economic climate, NICE continued its double-digit growth in Q4, thanks – in part – to three CCaaS megadeals.
Following a similar announcement last quarter, the continuous steam of such deals helped the vendor cross the $2BN mark in total revenues last year.
The first of the Q4 wins is with one of the largest banks in Latin America, which leveraged CXone across its various operations – replacing on-premise tech from three legacy vendors.
Barak Eilam, CEO of NICE, believes this deal showcases its enterprise deployment expertise.
During the earnings call, he stated:
We are highly recognized by this customer for our success with large enterprise implementations, our extensive digital and self-service capabilities, and the ability to deliver their future needs on a single, scalable platform.
The second megadeal is with a prominent Canadian insurance company. Eilam revealed that the business chose NICE due to the “completeness and native functionality” of the digital and self-service features within CXone.
As such, the insurer could converge its contact center systems and expand its digital footprint with a single vendor alone.
Finally, the third deal is with a well-established U.S.-based cellular company. Similar to the first, it is a displacement of multiple legacy providers.
However, in this case, the business chose NICE for its market leadership and – perhaps most interestingly – its financial stability, according to Eilam.
Medallia Debuts CX Platform for Omnichannel Insights
Medallia has launched a Medallia Experience Orchestration (MXO) service designed to give clients omnichannel customer insights that personalize and optimize the buyer’s journey.
The new platform allows its client base to leverage omnichannel insights so that enterprise end-users can understand precisely what a customer wants from a brand and its related online channels.
Moreover, Medallia predicts that its solution will help clients meet modern CX goals with reduced cost and time.
MXO gives organizations the tools to track customer conversations across various digital channels, allowing businesses to understand each customer and their personal needs.
The firm notes how its MXO solution can create personalized customer decisions that reflect an empathetically accurate, intent-driven, and journey-aware CX process.
Also, MXO provides a suite for clients to aggregate and manage customer journey data, real-time journey insights, and dynamic customer profiles.
Alex Glanz, the EVP of Strategy at Medallia, noted that organizations which embrace CX-based technological innovations, like MXO, can “unlock significant value in the form of lower operating costs, accelerated revenue growth, and enduring brand loyalty.”
Glanz also added:
Creating seamless, personal experiences requires organizations to go beyond measurement and analytics to drive action and influence experiences as they happen. Medallia Experience Orchestration fuels the future of customer experience by helping brands create more personal customer experiences across every touchpoint.
With integrated CX technology like AI chatbots and emerging eCommerce innovations, gaining a unified CX data insight solution can assist a business in leveraging modern retail tech, successfully connecting with customers, and securing a positive ROI via digital avenues.