Talkdesk has announced a new partnership with Cognizant to bring its Industry Experience Clouds to enterprises across the globe.
In addition, the collaboration promises to extend Talkdesk’s support services, giving customers access to Cognizant’s deep CX consulting base.
That base will assist Talkdesk customers in kickstarting and enhancing their Industry Experience Cloud deployments.
Those enhancements may include adding various forms of AI, which pull on that all-important industry-specific data within each Experience Cloud.
Diving deeper, Al Caravelli, SVP of Partnerships and Alliances at Talkdesk, stressed how the move will especially aid businesses in introducing generative AI (GenAI) within their service operations.
“GenAI offers unparalleled opportunities for enterprise companies to enhance and find hidden opportunities in customer experience,” he said.
Many enterprise organizations trust Cognizant to help them modernize and transform their customer experience, and through this collaboration, we look forward to bringing our GenAI offerings to more enterprises.
Currently, Talkdesk offers Industry Experience Clouds for banking, insurance carriers, healthcare providers, retailers, and government agencies.
Each boasts a core omnichannel CCaaS offering – alongside self-service, CX analytics, workforce engagement management (WEM), and employee collaboration solutions.
Yet, across the platforms are unique, industry-focused workspaces, flows, pre-integrated systems, and AI pre-trained on industry-specific data.
When it comes to AI, that industry-specific data matters. Maybe not for workflow automation, but it’s crucial for the future of virtual agents, reporting, forecasting, and more.
It will also become increasingly critical for the future of GenAI, with many predicting that smaller LLMs, trained on specific data sets and hosted in each vendor’s data centers, are the future.
Therefore, the Industry Experience Clouds have given Talkdesk a compelling differentiator within the increasingly crowded CCaaS space. Cognizant will help Talkdesk accentuate this.
As Sandra Notardonato, SVP of Alliances and Partnerships at Cognizant, stated:
Following decades of CX market leadership, integrating Talkdesk AI solutions into our offerings was a logical next step to ensure we continue transforming contact centers and customer experience through personalized, intelligent service and operational efficiencies.
By giving its customers and prospects access to Talkdesk’s CCaaS and AI offerings, Cognizant may also increase its brand recognition within the CX space.
Meanwhile, Talkdesk may build momentum around its industry-specific innovations, including those it recently announced that feature GenAI.
One excellent example is the industry-specific Talkdesk Autopilot, which the vendor has already released versions for banking, healthcare, and retail.
Autopilot can understand sector-specific intents and, utilizing contact center knowledge, take the customer on a self-service journey with auto-generated “intelligent and smooth” responses.
Yet, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, sees more value in the partnership enabling brands to build a broader AI strategy.
“Decisions about investing in AI can be complex and challenging,” he said. “Combining AI-first customer experience solutions from Talkdesk with Cognizant’s global consulting and transformation leadership will help enterprises realize the benefits of CX innovation faster and more efficiently.
It’s a great partnership for both companies and their customers.
Elsewhere, Talkdesk recently released an “industry-first” GenAI suite for on-premise contact centers, allowing them to access headline-hitting contact center innovations without migrating to the cloud.
Meanwhile, the vendor featured in the CX Today Marketplace for CCaaS. Cognizant also appeared but in the CX Business Process Outsourcing category.
