AT&T
Business Shaping the Customer Experience
for the Recovery Era
AI-Powered
Enhancements to AT&T Cloud Contact Center make advanced contact center
capabilities more accessible to more businesses
AT&T unveiled new AI-powered
capabilities to the AT&T Cloud Contact Center platform giving
nearly any business access to advanced contact center features. The AT&T
Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is joined by new built-in connectivity options
and integration with leading collaboration platform, AT&T Office@Hand, to give businesses more
ways to transform their customer experience and better adapt to fluctuating
call volumes.
- AT&T Intelligent Virtual Agent – There’s growing evidence customers are becoming more
comfortable with self-service options. Gartner Research says that 85% of
customer interactions will start with self-service by 2022.1
The Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is a cloud-based solution with
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide personalized interactions to
guide, assist and sell to customers at scale.
AT&T Intelligent Virtual Agent
provides businesses a flexible digital resource and the ability to extend
customer service operations to 24x7x365 without significant impact to the
customer experience. Also, self-service functionality allows the customer
to choose when and how they communicate with an organization, no longer
restricted to opening times, live agent availability and limited channels. With
no AI engine lock-in, AT&T IVA can integrate with all the market-leading AI
technologies and have the freedom and flexibility to select the ‘best fit’ for
their current applications.
AT&T Cloud Contact Center
Connect – The pandemic is proof that things
could turn again very quickly and that businesses might need to react just as
quickly to help ensure they can meet their customers’ needs. AT&T Cloud
Contact Center Connect offers rapid deployment of network connectivity into the
contact center. As agents scale up or down, connections can scale right
along with them, helping the customer avoid paying for unused capacity, all
with the quality and reliability of AT&T’s highly secure MPLS network.
- Integration with AT&T Office@Hand – AT&T Office@Hand integration with AT&T Cloud
Contact Center provides users of both platforms shared presence and
consolidated directories to better achieve first contact resolution. As a
result, agents can have access to a real-time view of availability and
access of other experts in the organization by department so they can
quickly identify someone who can better address customer inquiries.
Calling, conferencing and call transfers between both platforms are
on-network over a private SIP trunk and do not incur a toll charge.
The effect of the pandemic on
customer behavior remains undetermined and unpredictable, but there are signs
that businesses and consumers alike are eager to enter the next phase.
According to a study from McKinsey & Company, more than half of U.S.
consumers plan to increase discretionary spending in the near-term. That means
the pressure is on for businesses to effectively gain new customers and
increase loyalty from their existing customers.
These new capabilities can help
businesses do that by increasing an agent’s ability to produce positive
outcomes and reduce customer wait times while reducing their workloads. An
intelligent automated solution not only frees up agent resources to tackle more
complex inquiries, it can also help human agents resolve issues more quickly by
providing better information at their fingertips instantaneously.
While a recent Five9 survey also found that 52% of respondents
said that a contact center agent was the only company representative they had
been in contact with during COVID, changing behaviors means that operational
flexibility is key as businesses think through their contact center strategies
going forward. This can be true for businesses of any size and in nearly every
industry, and for smaller to mid-sized businesses, access to expanded
capabilities is often limited due to costs and the lack of expertise.
AT&T Cloud Contact Center gives
businesses the ability to deploy an advanced contact center functionality
economically and at the speed they require.
“In a business environment with so
many unknowns—policies varying by municipality, call volume, staffing levels,
budgets—the balance between managing resources and positive customer
experiences remains a huge challenge. AT&T Intelligent Virtual Agent is a
metaphorical “super suit” designed to boost the abilities of existing agents to
address customer needs, all while maintaining cost flexibility.” – Rich Shaw, Vice President, Voice and Collaboration,
AT&T Business
“The AT&T Cloud Contact Center
has already helped cut the time from a customer pre-approval on our landing
page to the time we call them. It’s less than 30 seconds, in most cases. We can
see enhancements like IVA to help create an even better customer experience.” –
Jeremy Elkins, Chief Information
Officer, Power Finance Texas
Source: AT&T media announcement
1 Gartner, Survey Analysis: Digital
Maturity in Customer Service, Investments and Impacts, Nadine LeBlanc, Jim
Davies, 20 January 2020.