Highlights:
- Microsoft has been hinting for a long that it plans to bundle a lot of its current technology into a contact center service.
- Representatives gave more information regarding what Nuance and some of Microsoft’s other existing AI technologies will bring to the contact-center party today at Inspire.
For the past few months, Microsoft representatives have been discussing plans for a digital contact center solution featuring Teams, Dynamics 365, and Nuance AI. On the first day of Microsoft’s annual partner conference, Inspire 2022, representatives reiterated ambitions for its unified digital contact center and provided further information.
In March 2022, Microsoft completed the acquisition of Nuance Communications. Microsoft acquired the company that was best known not just for its work in healthcare but also its products in voice recognition and related software and services for USD 19.7 billion. Before Microsoft acquired Nuance, the company had already provided its contact center technologies.
Microsoft had been hinting for a long that it plans to bundle a lot of its current technology into a contact center service. Microsoft executives announced the launch of an all-in-one digital contact center in November 2021, before the acquisition of Nuance was finalized. This center combined Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Insights, Microsoft Advertising, and first-party voice services.
Officials said that they were developing a joint Nuance-Microsoft contact center solution after the acquisition of Nuance by Microsoft was completed. In a bid to establish a “safe, AI-infused contact center,” they claimed they would combine Nuance’s AI technology with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service solution.
Representatives gave more information regarding what Nuance and some of Microsoft’s other existing AI technologies will bring to the contact-center party at Inspire. Officials from Microsoft claimed that their “Context IQ” predictive/sentiment analysis technology would assist customer care representatives in better understanding consumer emotions and help them provide their next-best suggestions for upselling and cross-selling. It also integrates Power Virtual Agents into the unified digital contact center to offer self-service capabilities.
According to company officials, Accenture-Avanade, one of Microsoft’s key partners, will supply its customer interaction solutions powered by Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center Platform. The Microsoft contact-center platform will also be sold by other partners, including, among others, HY, HCL, Hitachi, KMPG, PwC, TCS, and TTEC.
According to Microsoft representatives, the new Digital Contact Center platform will go live on July 19 and can be tailored to suit the requirements of individual users. Beginning August 1, Microsoft and Nuance will make a joint offer on enterprise agreements. Customers can purchase Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Nuance Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Nuance Gatekeeper (GK), and Nuance Digital Engagement Platform (NDEP) via this offer on their Microsoft Enterprise Agreements.
Other Microsoft Dynamics news includes the release last week of the company’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product plans for Wave 2 of 2022. Between October 2022 and March 2023, Microsoft plans to release hundreds of incremental additions across Dynamics 365/Industry Clouds and Power Platform. Some of the features’ early access will start on August 1.
