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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 has released a new, all-in-one , cloud-based offers to take on hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, and other rivals including Oracle, SAP and ServiceNow.
Dubbed the 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 Microsoft’s low-code platform portfolio.
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 revenue growth, Lamanna said.
AI capabilities allow the service to determine the purpose 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 while calling, to help resolve a particular issue, and intelligent case swarming — a feature that allows agents to view the 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, designed to conduct emotion 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 be 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. System integrators such as EY, TCS, KPMG, and PwC will also help businesses integrate the new digital contact center, Microsoft said.
CCaaS and UCaaS are integrated
Microsoft may catch up with the CCaaS party but the vendor is moving forward by essentially replicating its unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) product, Teams, on the new CCaaS platform, along with Dynamics Customer 365, it said Liz Miller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
Dynamics Customer 365, which will continue to be sold, is Microsoft’s current customer service module, housed within the Dynamics 365 ERP suite.
“The new Digital Contact Center takes the foundation of service offering to Dynamics Customer 365 and incorporates Teams, Nuance and the size and availability of the cloud,” Miller said.
The move to integrate UCaaS and CCaaS is trendy as the increasing use of UCaaS tools has forced customer support operations to increasingly rely on cloud communications to meet customer needs, he said. Miller.
“The announcement comes at a time when consumers of CCaaS solutions are desperately looking around for the easy button,” Miller said.
“These are consumers who are tasked to turn the contact center into a revenue growth opportunity from an operational cost center that inadvertently delivers negative customer experiences to 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 fierce, said Vasupradha Srinivasan, a senior analyst at Forrester.
“The new product will face stiff competition as it competes with 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 can be a strategic sweet spot for the new product, especially if Microsoft wants to package it with a purchase of Dynamics or Azure enterprise.
The global CCaaS market is growing, expected to reach $ 15.07 billion in 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 Amazon Connect’s cloud-based contact center service.
In March, Google Cloud streamlined 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 insight and data analytics.
Tags MicrosoftAmazon Web ServicesGoogle Cloud
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