In today’s digital world, brand reputation is synonymous with customer experience, including the quality of customer care. Consumers expect effortless, consistent, and secure experiences across any point of contact they choose—in fact, their brand perception and customer loyalty depend on it. With the stakes this high, companies need a comprehensive yet flexible solution to modernize their customer care experience.

We are thrilled to introduce the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, an open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solution designed to deliver seamless customer journeys.

Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform powered with Nuance AI, Teams, and Dynamics 365

With the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, contact centers are equipped with modern digital tools to engage customers across voice, video, and other digital engagement channels—powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and the newest member of the Microsoft family, Nuance.

The platform brings together a comprehensive yet flexible solution for contact centers, delivering best-in-class AI that powers self-service experiences, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities.  

The addition of Nuance brings a new level of conversational AI, security, and automation to the contact center. This gives both customers and agents tools to resolve issues faster and with more personalized service, thus reducing resolution times while improving customer satisfaction. It also enables contact centers to offer targeted incentives to build brand loyalty and upsell opportunities to boost revenue.

We recognize that the complexity and cost of upgrading technology can hold back innovation required to transform customer service from being a cost center to becoming a revenue driver. The open nature of our platform enables companies to build on what they already have and easily add any combination of capabilities they need to take their contact center to the next level. It integrates with a variety of contact center infrastructures and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Companies can start small or go big, on their terms, and add capabilities at the right time. We are partnering with leaders in contact center infrastructure—including Accenture–Avanade, Avaya, Genesys, HCL, NICE, and TTEC—to ensure interoperability and compatibility with contact center systems and components companies use or plan to implement now and in the future.

Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform

Deliver seamless customer journeys with a collaborative contact center solution.

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Enable omnichannel engagement and intelligent self-service

The average consumer uses multiple channels to communicate with a brand. The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform makes it easy to meet consumers in the channels they use every day—from voice to digital messaging—with secure and protected interactions. With the platform, companies can:

• Resolve customer needs quickly and easily with customer self-service and automation, enabling scale through automation of repeatable tasks as well as sophisticated transactions.
• Intelligently connect customers to virtual and live agents with the best-suited skills, experience, capacity, and availability, and provide agents with AI-powered recommendations.
• Deliver hyper-personalized omnichannel service across voice and digital engagement channels, including support for major social messaging platforms. Provide richer service engagement with Teams voice and video embedded within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Personalize and protect customer interactions

Consumers today expect brands to provide tailored experiences based on their engagement with the company. Delivering personalized experiences starts with using AI to identify and authenticate consumers seamlessly and securely, and requires unlocking the power of data to understand, customize, and optimize customer journeys.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform uses AI and deep analytics to anticipate customer requests, predict intent, and provide rapid resolution, which streamlines service and increases satisfaction. Customer experiences are protected with integrated biometric identification, authentication, and fraud prevention to build and maintain brand trust. The platform:

• Uses biometric authentication to authenticate customers in seconds based on inherent biometrics and other factors.
• Secures every customer and employee interaction, and prevents fraud while uncovering fraud patterns and attack vectors.
• Provides insights on how consumers interact with the brand throughout their journey with customer journey analytics to improve customer acquisition and tailor personalized offers.
• Understands why customers are calling and customizes the experience to anticipate their needs with AI intent prediction.

Improve agent productivity and modernize case management

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform empowers agents to better serve customers by bringing the right information, people, and insights directly into the flow of work with Context IQ. It provides intelligent next-best response recommendations and sentiment analysis to enable fast resolutions. What’s more, this creates a learning loop so automated solutions continually evolve and become smarter. The platform:

• Provides agents with a 360-degree view of the customer and their journey. Agents can manage customer requests seamlessly from any channel, even while handling multiple sessions at the same time.
• Empowers agents with personalized conversational intelligence, including sentiment analysis, to truly understand customer emotions and needs. Next-best response and offer recommendations help create valuable upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Assists the agent in identifying the resolution with AI-recommended knowledge articles.
• Automates how agents quickly and efficiently bring together experts to resolve an open case through intelligent case swarming. With a single click, agents can collaborate with experts matched based on skillset and expertise.

Increase customer acquisition and revenue

Rich real-time insights and analytics enable data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction, with conversational analytics providing instant visibility into trends across engagement channels. With the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, companies can:

• Enable agents to increase conversions and drive upsell through real-time offers.
• Help customers find and select products through personalized offer recommendations, driving upsell and cross-sell revenue.
• Track user behavior and data to quickly identify and offer optimal engagement opportunities through predictive targeting, thereby improving satisfaction and increasing revenue.
• Preemptively notify customers of special promotions and updates, which accelerates their purchase intent, and boosts revenue and long-term value.

Drive infrastructure simplicity, flexibility, and innovation

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform simplifies implementation and support of contact center infrastructure, removing complex IT integrations while maintaining flexibility for customers and partners seeking comprehensive Contact Center and Customer Engagement solutions.

Contact center tasks and workflows ranging in complexity from routine conversations to sophisticated transactions can easily be automated using no-code, low-code, or pro-code experiences. Powerful chatbots equipped with conversational AI can be created to converse with customers intelligently and efficiently across engagement channels. Consumers can self-service a wide variety of cases, getting connected with a live agent when needed for support with complex issues.

The platform is also cloud-scale and elastic to accommodate seasonal or surging demand. It automatically adjusts to changes in contact volume, agent counts, wait times, and service levels without performance impact.

Transform the contact center with our extensive partner network

Accenture–Avanade, a customer experience (CX) transformation partner, will deliver its Customer Engagement solutions starting with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform to help customers reimagine their entire customer experience and deliver business results. Additional launch partners include systems integrators EY, HCL, Hitachi, KPMG, PwC, TCS, and TTEC, and ISVs such as Avaya, Genesys, and NICE. With this robust set of launch partners, customers around the globe will be positioned to create new and sophisticated solutions to address specific contact center challenges.

Learn more

Learn more about how to transform customer and agent experiences with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform and explore the full set of capabilities.

Join us at Microsoft Inspire on July 19–20 to learn how to unleash customer service innovations with Dynamics 365, Teams, and Nuance.

The post Introducing the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform: A comprehensive, flexible customer care solution appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This post is co-authored by Tony Lorentzen, Senior Vice President and General Manager Intelligent Engagement, Nuance.

Since Microsoft and Nuance joined forces earlier this year, both teams have been clear about our commitment to putting our customers first. Microsoft and Nuance are dedicated to ensuring our products complement each other, accelerate better business outcomes, and continue to deliver value well into the future.  

We have never been more confident in our ability to continue offering organizations exceptional AI-powered customer engagement solutions. There’s a good reason why a majority of the Fortune 100 companies worldwide rely on Nuance customer engagement solutions, and we are excited by the significant potential Nuance’s pioneering, industry-specific technology has in the Microsoft ecosystem. Nuance solutions complement and enhance Microsoft’s portfolio, delivering value across every engagement channel. Microsoft’s continued investment in cloud and AI innovation offers massive opportunity to bolster Nuance solutions with new capabilities.

Nuance customer engagement solutions

We are investing in Nuance’s proven customer engagement solutions that combine advanced conversational AI with a full spectrum of technologies to achieve market-leading accuracy and containment rates. Nuance has the unique capabilities to enable organizations to automate, personalize, and secure customer interactions, only now with the power of Microsoft behind it. This spans Nuance products and services inclusive of:    

• Nuance Digital Engagement Platform (NDEP): The powerful functionality of NDEP comes from deep expertise in conversational AI and experience delivering AI-powered innovations in key vertical markets. Nuance digital engagement solutions are vendor-agnostic, offering complete flexibility and investment protection for organizations that: want to integrate best-of-breed virtual assistant or live chat solutions with a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) from any vendor; have a third-party virtual assistant, but need to integrate it with an industry-leading live agent platform; want to add powerful new messaging capabilities to a third-party agent desktop; or need to surface third-party product recommendations, next-best actions, knowledgebase information, tech support, or order management systems to their agents on a unified desktop. 

• Nuance Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Nuance has deep roots in delivering powerful IVR solutions and shares Microsoft’s vision for enabling an intelligent, personalized, and secure customer experience through advanced AI. Customers should expect Nuance Conversational IVR to continue to deliver innovations in automation to enable self-service with high containment rates while further increasing the speed, efficiency, and ability of agents to resolve most incoming calls successfully using real-time data and context. Our shared goal is to enable enterprise-grade, secure, conversational applications for the IVR that are capable of handling everything from straightforward customer queries to complex, demanding interactions. And we are committed to flexibly working with our ISV and channel partners to make our market-leading, vertical-specific Natural Language Understanding available to global organizations.  
• Nuance security and biometrics: One of the most exciting things that Nuance brings to customer experience engagements is its market-leading biometric authentication and fraud prevention solutions. These technologies are helping enterprises make customer interactions not only more enjoyable but also more secure while helping to prevent fraud—both critical to successfully providing the outcomes-driven customer engagement Microsoft and Nuance are committed to delivering together. Cloud-native Nuance Gatekeeper is a differentiator in the market, and we will continue to invest in advancing its capabilities, while exploring its huge potential in the Microsoft ecosystem. 
• Nuance Mix: Microsoft and Nuance share a vision to provide the most complete and compelling AI-driven customer engagement and contact center portfolio, with secure tools that span no-code, low-code, and pro-code to accelerate transformation. Nuance Mix makes it easier to create sophisticated, human-like engagements that enable customers to self-serve with a chatbot, speak to the IVR in a conversational way as if they were speaking to human agents, and help maximize self-service adoption and containment across any channel.  

Learn more about Microsoft and Nuance

Our goal with “Microsoft + Nuance: Better Together” is to deliver lasting business value to the market. Together, with our trailblazing customers and partners, we will bring to market new innovations, while also ensuring our customers’ existing investments are protected and continue to flourish. As we look at adding new capabilities, together, Microsoft and Nuance will ensure clear paths forward providing customers future-proof solutions that continue to deliver outcomes today and tomorrow.   

We are excited to share more about how we’ll bring the full power of Microsoft and Nuance to organizations worldwide.

• The AI-powered contact center, part 1: Create engaging digital experiences
• The AI-powered contact center, part 2: Achieve superior self-service voice support
• The AI-powered contact center, part 3: Build powerful conversational AI solutions
• The AI-powered contact center, part 4: Enhance contact center security with biometric authentication

Join us at Microsoft Inspire to learn more.  

The post The future of customer engagement is bright with Microsoft and Nuance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.