Talkdesk, makers of cloud-based contact center solutions, last week launched a virtual agent to offer natural, humanlike customer self-service applications. Powered by the company’s analytics and reporting engine Talkdesk iQ, the intelligent assistant is a voice-enabled chatbot tapping a knowledge base and text-to-speech technologies to enable conversational assistance.

According to Talkdesk, the virtual agent is natively built in the cloud and able to tap CRM data to foster interactions that are personalized and integrated with ticketing systems. As the intelligent assistant analyzes customer intent, the system can identify contextual information to create cases and schedule call backs for agents at a more appropriate time.

As Opus Research has documented, virtual agents engage customers, when appropriate, to support and answer user questions and take action to decrease costs and optimize service channels. By addressing customer needs with an automated agent, this helps organizations reduce the number of calls and free agents to address more complex service tasks.

Talkdesk also emphasized the growing success of combining intelligent assistant technologies with human agent assistance, citing an Accenture study that claimed up to 90% customer satisfaction with a blended customer support workflow. Indeed, properly balancing Conversational AI technologies (natural language processing, machine leaning, sentiment analysis, etc.) with human capabilities is a recipe for success in recognizing and predicting intent to shorten the time it takes for customers to accomplish tasks.

Speaking of AI for contact center support, in a partnership with Observe.AI, Talkdesk also offers Agent Assist, a quality and compliance tool to help guide agents, increase contact center efficiency, and improve the caller experience. The AI-infused tools analyze insights from customer conversations to improve quality assurance as well as boost KPIs and associated contact center metrics.

As AI, automation, and conversational technologies continue to infiltrate the contact center, the fundamental business metrics apply: making customers happy, helping agents in their work, and improving the bottom line. This offers an opportunity for brands and enterprises to utilize automated self-service and agent assistance to prove real business value.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles