It has been another busy few weeks in the contact center space with announcements about products, integrations, partnerships, and expanded geographic availability. Other news of note included Salesforce’s recent introduction of a contact center solution.

Boost.ai and CallMiner Partner to Provide Omnichannel Insights

In a move that will expand the companies’ offerings to contact center customers, Boost.ai and CallMiner have formed a strategic partnership. Leveraging Boost.ai’s conversational AI and its ability to hold detailed conversations with customers, the CallMiner platform will ingest these conversations, allowing for insights to be generated from each customer conversation, including those with virtual agents. Additionally, the advanced analytics offered by CallMiner can help refine Boost.ai’s conversational AI, and organizations will be able to more clearly see why a customer’s chat or voice bot is getting certain results, allowing chatbot performance to be adjusted.

“In our omnichannel world, more customers are opting for self-service channels, including chatbots or virtual agents. For CallMiner, we see this as another stream of data that can deliver the insights needed to improve customer outcomes and experience,” says Scott Kendrick, VP of Strategy, CallMiner. “Boost.ai’s enterprise scalability, level of accuracy and resolution, and strong commitment to customer success made this partnership a natural fit.”

Cisco Announces Enhanced Webex CX Portfolio

Cisco has launched new features and capabilities for its Webex CX offering. Webex CX offers Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS), Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) and Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) all in one portfolio, allowing for omnichannel customer journeys.

“Digital-first consumers now demand a more responsive and personalized experience from the brands they love,” says Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM, Cisco Security and Collaboration. “This trend is driving companies to reconsider their approach to CX. They want a single vendor offering that brings together advanced CX capabilities with the security and reliability they’ve come to expect from Cisco.”

Some of the new capabilities and features include:

• AI-powered noise reduction technology available in Webex Contact Center
• Customer engagement via 16+ channels, including Instagram and Google Business Messages
• Microsoft Teams certification for Webex Contact Center
• Enhanced cloud-based supervisor dashboard to observe agent performance, send messages within the Webex App, and view detailed agent information and call highlights

Edify Labs Integrates with ChromeOS Desk Connector for Contact Centers

Edify Labs has integrated with the new ChromeOS Desk connector for contact centers, creating something called “the desk,” an organizer to manage all tabs and apps an agent needs for a specific interaction, including the single window Edify CX contact center platform. This connector allows Edify to create a new “desk” for each interaction and organize all the apps, windows, and tools an agent needs in one spot.

“This is another tangible step forward in making employee experiences more intuitive, productive, and secure – which directly impacts every customer,” says Bracken Fields, co-founder and CTO of Edify. “As consumers, we all know it’s painful to wait as an agent tries to find information to resolve our issue. The Edify integration to ChromeOS Desk connector puts everything agents need in front of them with a single click.”

Freshworks Infuses AI into CX products

Freshworks announced product updates that included layering AI across its CX solutions. Freshchat and Freshdesk both saw additions and enhancements.

Related to the contact center, intelligent omnichannel conversations powered by Freshchat have been introduced with the following capabilities:

• Smart Reply gives AI-powered auto-complete responses, making suggestions to agents as they type responses to customers. Intelligent recommendations are personalized to the user’s last message, the full background of the conversation and the customer’s past buying patterns.
• Email in the Freshchat Inbox allows agents to have personalized omnichannel conversations with customers.
• Conversations Widget allows support admin teams to use a single widget to power live chat and self-service AI.

“Conversational intelligence across sales, marketing, and support is the next step companies must take to unify and personalize the customer experience,” says Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer at Freshworks. “Unlike some legacy vendors, we believe business software should empower people, not frustrate them. Our built-in AI functionality makes it easier than ever and is designed to keep up with customers and employee demands.”

For customer support, powered by Freshdesk, AI is now being used to help automatically triage and routes ticket to the correct support agent or group. Additionally, integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams were introduced.

Sytel’s Softdial Cloud Has Expanded Availability

Sytel announced the expanded availability of its Contact Center as a Solution subscription, Softdial Cloud. Aimed at SMB and enterprise contact centers, Softdial Cloud had previously only been available in North America, but now has availability throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. 

Softdial Cloud offers many out of the box capabilities including:

• Automated response to changing customer contact patterns, with full blending and balancing of all voice, email, chat, and messaging queues
• A cloud ACD that will scale to more than 10,000 agents but can also manage a 50-seat contact center 
• A predictive dialer
• In-session channel switching
• The ability for agents to multitask across contact channels at the same time
• An extensive set of APIs to allow integration with any third-party product 
• Comprehensive reporting, for real-time monitoring and historical analysis 

According to Sytel CEO, Michael McKinlay, “Softdial Cloud gives full access to our flagship Softdial Contact Center (SCC) software, delivering rich, full-service functionality at scale in the cloud; no restriction, no compromise. Supervisors are freed from having to constantly monitor service levels. Agents are kept productive automatically, with the right workload for their ability, even multiple text sessions at once.” 

McKinlay adds, “Softdial Cloud is good news for customers, too. Yes, they can use their channel of choice – chat, voice, email, etc. But they can also switch easily between them to continue the conversation with the same agent, who has everything they need in a single web app, no matter which channel. A seamless customer journey delivers faster resolution with less effort, so more satisfied customers.”