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With an eye on the growing contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market — driven by enterprise efforts to offer better service and customer experience — Microsoft released a new, all-in-one , cloud-based offering to take on hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, and other rivals including Oracle, SAP and ServiceNow.
Dubbed Digital Contact Center, the new offering combines artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with existing Microsoft services and products including Dynamics 365, Teams, Power Platform and Nuance, said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business applications and low-code platform portfolio at Microsoft .
The new service was launched at Microsoft’s annual Inspire conference. The idea behind the new contact center service is to provide omnichannel engagement, self-service, intent prediction, biometric authentication, and customer analytics to allow companies to offer personalized services that will ultimately drive income growth, said Lamanna.
AI capabilities allow the service to determine the intent behind a customer call, connecting the customer to the agent best suited to handle the issue at hand.
Other features, according to Lamanna, include knowledge-article recommendations for agents during calls, to help resolve a specific issue, and intelligent case swarming—a feature that allows agents to view case history and help them connect with experts as needed.
The Digital Contact Center allows agents to interact with customers across multiple channels (voice, video, chat) simultaneously and perform biometric authentication, Microsoft said, adding that it also allows businesses to design chatbots for handling repetitive and complex tasks.
In addition, Microsoft’s new offering includes a module called ContextIQ, which is designed to perform sentiment analysis and suggest the next best responses to agents during a call. This ability also helps create a learning loop for automated applications, such as chatbots, to become smarter.
Microsoft has partnered with companies including Accenture, Avanade, Genesys, and HCL, to make the new offering interoperable and compatible with other existing contact center systems, it said. Systems integrators such as EY, TCS, KPMG, and PwC will also assist businesses in integrating the new digital contact center, Microsoft said.
CCaaS and UCaaS are unified
Microsoft may be late to the CCaaS party but the vendor is making progress by essentially folding its unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) product, Teams, into the new CCaaS platform, along with Dynamics Customer 365, says Liz Miller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
Dynamics Customer 365, which will continue to be sold, is Microsoft’s current customer service module, contained within the Dynamics 365 ERP suite.
“The new Digital Contact Center takes the foundation of the Dynamics Customer 365 service offering and incorporates Teams, Nuance and the scale and availability of the cloud,” Miller said.
The move to unify UCaaS and CCaaS is on trend as the increased use of UCaaS tools has forced customer support operations to increasingly rely on cloud communications to meet customer needs, said Miller.
“The announcement comes at a time when buyers of CCaaS solutions are desperately looking around for the easy button,” Miller said.
“These are buyers tasked with turning the contact center from an operational cost center that inadvertently delivers negative customer experiences into a revenue growth opportunity by delivering exceptional experiences. “
Microsoft faces competition in the CCaaS market
While the new CCaaS offering seems like a logical extension of Microsoft’s current product portfolio and puts the company in the end-to-end, customer-services provider market at a time when one-stop solutions are in demand , the competition will be tough, said Vasupradha Srinivasan, a senior analyst at Forrester.
“The new product will face stiff competition as it goes up against players with years of contact center and customer service expertise,” Srinivasan said, adding that there is an under-catered, mid-market segment of business that could be a strategic sweet spot for the new product, especially if Microsoft wants to package it with a Dynamics or Azure enterprise purchase.
The global CCaaS market is growing, expected to reach $15.07 billion by 2029, representing a compound annual growth rate of 17.5 percent from $4.87 billion in 2022, according to Fortune Business Insights.
Microsoft’s rivals in the market are not standing still. In June, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) added a new case management feature, called Amazon Cases, to its Amazon Connect cloud-based contact center service.
In March, Google Cloud tweaked its Contact Center AI (CCAI) service to give it the ability to integrate with CRM (customer relationship management) applications to provide enterprises with real-time insights and data analytics.
Tags MicrosoftAmazon Web ServicesGoogle Cloud
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