The AI-powered contact center, part 3: Build powerful conversational AI solutions

To remain competitive and thrive, organizations must differentiate their brand through outstanding customer service experiences. As customer expectations and business needs continuously shift, enterprises need the agility to rapidly create, maintain, and optimize those experiences with the latest technologies, including sophisticated AI, without relying on external vendors.

What enterprises need are options that keep them in control—a choice of no-code, low-code, and pro-code AI development tools that offer the freedom to quickly build the conversational AI applications they need. After the recent launch of the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, organizations now have those options.

The right tools for the job 

Some organizations want the flexibility and agility to build their own conversational solution in-house on an end-to-end software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is quick to deploy, monitor and tune; one that can easily be self-managed by their subject experts. For such organizations, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and the underlying low-code Power Platform is the right choice. Power Virtual Agents solutions are used widely in many industries—from airlines to technology firms—and for a variety of use cases, from internal-facing help desk solutions to external-facing chatbots across multiple channels and languages.

Some examples of Power Virtual Agents users include:

  • A municipal government with 1.4 million citizens using Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Teams to empower subject matter experts to easily address employee queries.
  • A sports and events organization using Dynamics 365 and Power Virtual Agents to scale their contact center with a 97 percent resolution rate.
  • A financial institution using Power Virtual Agents and Dynamics 365 to enable text and voice enabled bots to serve customers banking needs. 
graphical user interface, application
Figure 1: Power Virtual Agents intuitive graphical interface showing the conversational flow design and topic navigation.

For large enterprises that need a custom-built natural language model or those with sophisticated interactive voice response (IVR) omnichannel needs, Nuance Mix is the right choice. Such organizations can also call on Nuance Professional Services teams at any stage of their project, drawing on deep expertise in developing, deploying, tuning, and optimizing custom-built conversational AI applications. Omnichannel IVRs and chatbots built using Mix by Nuance Professional Services are widely used by large enterprises, including Fortune 100 companies, from large telcos to major retailers across the world in multiple languages.

Some examples of Nuance Mix users include:

  • A large airline putting Nuance Mix at the center of its virtual assistant (VA) and IVR omnichannel strategy to add transactional self-service functionalities
  • A 5G mobile network operator using Nuance Mix to create a customer care VA that enables its customers to resolve issues by simply speaking or typing.
  • A recognized leader in clinical communication and workflow solutions using Nuance Mix to enable care teams to communicate and collaborate in real-time.
n Mix.dialog, call flow designers build on core components that can orchestrate mixed‑initiative dialogs
Figure 2: In Mix.dialog, call flow designers build on core components that can orchestrate mixed‑initiative dialogs.

Shaping the future of the contact center together

Regardless of which solution organizations begin with, the Digital Contact Center Platform will provide interoperability between them. As we continue to bring Nuance Mix and Power Virtual Agents closer together on the Digital Contact Center Platform, their strengths will make powerful conversational AI solutions even easier and faster to build. And as ever, our commitment to protecting your current investments is thanks to backward compatibility and a clear, disruption-free migration path to any future solutions.

Next steps

In the final article in this series, we will turn our attention to biometrics and fraud prevention in the digital contact center. In the meantime, learn more about how to create engaging, personalized digital experiences, and achieve superior self-service voice support with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform.