Today’s customers expect more engaging, personalized service experiences from the brands they choose. They want intelligent self-service that offers always-on digital convenience. And they expect agents, whether human or virtual, to not just know who they are, but to already have an idea why they are reaching out and how to help.

That’s why we launched the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platforman open, extensible, and collaborative platform for delivering seamless, omnichannel customer engagement at scalebuilt with AI at its heart, powered by Nuance technologies.

Bringing the power of AI to the contact center

AI is fast becoming an essential part of every contact center strategy, helping improve customer experiences while reducing costs, and helping contact center leaders accomplish their customer acquisition, retention, and revenue goals.

And now, enterprises have even more ways to optimize their digital experience strategy with AI.

The launch of the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform shows our commitment to putting our customers first. It brings together innovation from Nuance and Microsoft to power unmatched self-service experiences, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities. In this series of articles, we’ll outline how Nuance solutions enable the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform to deliver value across every engagement channelstarting with digital.

Creating standout digital experiences

As we enter a new, AI-powered era for the contact center, we look forward to stories from enterprise customers about how they’ve optimized their digital engagement strategies with the capabilities of Nuance’s intelligent engagement solutions and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure.

Flexibility and choice, with an open platform

Many enterprises want to augment their digital capabilities to provide intelligent, omnichannel experiences. But they also need to protect the investments they’ve made in their existing customer engagement solutions, contact center platforms, and back-office systems.

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform uses open, vendor-agnostic Nuance digital engagement solutions to offer complete flexibility and investment protection for organizations that want to:

• Integrate best-of-breed virtual assistant or live chat solutions with a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) from any vendor.
• Have a third-party virtual assistant, but need to integrate it with an industry-leading live agent platform.
• Add powerful new messaging capabilities to a third-party agent desktop.
• Surface third-party product recommendations, next best actions, knowledgebase information, tech support, or order management systems to their agents on a unified desktop.

And now that Microsoft and Nuance innovations are on a single platform, it’s even simpler for organizations currently using the Nuance Digital Engagement Platform to benefit from everything the Microsoft cloud has to offer, including CRM, knowledge management, case management, collaboration tools, and many other services.

A proven track record of increasing self-serviceand driving sales

The Nuance solutions on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform have a strong record of enabling intelligent self-service and increasing containment.

For example, the AI-powered targeting engine behind Nuance Virtual Assistant and Live Assist uses customer profiles and purchase history to engage customers with personalized incentives and relevant offers at the right moment in their journey. That creates more valuable upsell and cross-sell opportunities, helping increase sales in digital channels. Esurance, for instance, generated live chat incremental sales of $4.4 million in just one quarter after implementing Nuance Live Assistand also saw 86 percent increased customer satisfaction with live chat.

Advanced capabilities built on decades of contact center AI experience

The powerful functionality of Nuance digital solutions comes from long experience in delivering AI-powered innovations for all customer engagement channels.

With Nuance AI on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, organizations can use proactive targeting to deliver the right kind of engagement for each customerat exactly the right time. They can enhance digital experiences by using rich media widgets in messaging channels. They can reduce the time and cost of ramping up new agents by delivering real-time guidance and recommendations straight to the agent desktop. The list goes on.

Plus, Nuance biometric authentication and intelligent fraud prevention solutions help streamline customer experiences and protect every interaction. And everything is delivered through a highly secure, compliant, and capable web interface that meets the stringent data privacy and security standards that regulators, businesses, and customers demand.

A roadmap for the future of the digital contact center

It’s an exciting time to be working with customer engagement leaders. We’re developing an evergreen roadmap for the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, and while we’ll continuously add new capabilities, we’ll also ensure our customers’ existing investments are protected, enabling them to migrate seamlessly to our combined platform at their own pace.

Together with our trailblazing customers, discover how Nuance and Microsoft can offer limitless flexibility, unmatched operational efficiency, amazing customer and agent experiencesand better business outcomes with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform.

The post The AI-powered contact center, part 1: Create engaging digital experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.