Microsoft will launch Copilot for Service in a public preview next month.
The enterprise tech giant made the announcement at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event.
There, Microsoft also teased that the Copilot will become generally available during the first quarter of 2024 – costing $50 per user per month.
Sharing the news at an analyst pre-briefing, Frank X. Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Communications at Microsoft, stated:
The Microsoft Copilot for service includes the Copilot for 365 and helps to extend contact centers with generative AI to boost agent productivity.
Feedback from the Copilot Early Access program underlines this, with contact centers noting how call handling times had dropped – on average – by 12 percent.
Moreover, 77 percent of employees noted that they didn’t want to give up Copilot – and the same percentage of respondents said they would even sacrifice a free lunch every week in return for their continued access to Copilot.
“Copilot for Service integrates with existing investments in third-party CRM and contact center solutions,” continued Shaw. “That includes out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.”
[Also,] it can be extended to other systems with more than 1,000 pre-built and custom connectors.
Once part of the contact center environment, Copilot for Service will assist agents and supervisors in the flow of their work in several ways.
Auto-generating customer replies across email – which agents can review, modify, and send – and case auto-summarizations to accelerate post-contact processing are the chief use cases.
Yet, agents may also use Copilot while engaging with customers over the phone to surface invaluable information from various secure knowledge sources.
Noting this, Shaw continued: “During customer interactions, agents can ask Copilot for Service questions in natural language and receive relevant insights pulled from customer and product data, source from knowledge repositories.
“This will really improve the speed at which agents can assist and resolve cases, providing better experiences for both agents and customers.”
Finally, managers and supervisors may monitor how agents utilize Copilot. Indeed, they may uncover:
- How often agents use Copilot during customer conversations
- How many customer conversations involved Copilot
- The length of interactions that include Copilot
- The percentage of queries agents resolved with Copilot
With all this insight, contact centers can accurately track the impact of Copilot on critical metrics – such as customer satisfaction and average handling time.
They may also see how high-performing agents utilize Copilot and create a set of best practices to seep even more value from the virtual assistant.
Where Does the Copilot Studio Come In?
Copilot for Service joins several other Copilots that Microsoft has launched across Dynamics and its broader enterprise application portfolio.
Office, Teams, Bing, Viva, Loop… you name it, and a Copilot is there, pre-trained to handle various use cases.
Yet, with the launch of a new low-code Copilot Studio in public preview, businesses can now build, test, and publish standalone copilots and custom GPTs for internal and external use.
In doing so, they may unlock unique use cases across various enterprise scenarios – inside and outside the contact center.
As such, the Studio supports Microsoft’s goal to extend “Copilot across every role and function to transform business processes for office and frontline workers to developers and IT professionals,” as Shaw puts it.
We believe in the future there will be a Copilot for everyone and everything you do.
Moreover, the Studio works with connectors, plugins, and GPTs, allowing IT teams to steer copilots to the best data sources for various queries.
They may also secure and manage these standalone assistants with the right access, data, user controls, and analytics.
Summing up, Shaw notes: “AI transformation within a company starts by tapping into the unique business data and workflows.
With Copilot Studio, organizations can interface with business data to drive productivity and smooth over tedious workflows in an intuitive and incredibly simple way.
Alongside creating standalone copilots, the Studio also allows Copilot for Microsoft 365 users to customize the pre-trained use cases.
Indeed, it’ll come built into the Copilot for Microsoft 365 offering, which will likely set a precedent for all Copilots – across Dynamics, Teams, Loop, etc. – to come with such a studio.
If this is what the future holds, it may even easier for contact centers to build their own virtual assistants and assist agents and supervisors in new, fascinating ways.
Microsoft Copilot offers an excellent example of generative AI in the contact center. For more, check out our article: 20 Use Cases for Generative AI In Customer Service
