The application of artificial intelligence to a converged communications platform enables better customer service and employee collaboration.
This week Dialpad announced the evolution of its “TrueCaaS” strategy, using the phrase “AI-Powered Customer Intelligence.”
The company had been using TrueCaaS to describe its single cloud software stack that can deliver Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
One of the primary benefits of a converged platform is having a single data lake with which to perform analytics to make business decisions. Most communications vendors offer UCaaS or CCaaS and then partner for the other capability. Dialpad is one of the few that has built a single, cloud native stack to deliver both.
To date, the goal of TrueCaaS has been to enable customers to create better workflows between customer service via the contact center and employee facing communications using meeting, messaging, and other collaboration tools. Now that it has this back end built, it is now applying artificial intelligence to create new capabilities.
Dialpad Builds AI In-House for Faster Innovation
Most of the cloud communications companies partner to deliver AI capabilities but Dialpad has bucked this trend and builds all its own AI models in-house.
Since acquiring TalkIQ in 2018, Dialpad has been creating advanced capabilities that combine communications with real-time speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP). Its AI-powered Customer Intelligence Platform builds on the more than three billion minutes of real-time data collected to date by analyzing conversations, automating workflows, and providing predictive insights.
The launch comes at a time when the market is evolving from point communications solutions to unified employee and customer experiences, according to John Finch, Dialpad’s Sr. VP of Solutions Marketing. Many organizations still struggle to make sense of how to connect workers and collaborate using different tools. This is Dialpad’s way of addressing the need for an AI-driven workplace by tapping into AI’s full potential.
UCaaS and CCaaS Combined with AI Streamlines Workflows
“We’re making a brand narrative shift. Rather than being a TrueCaaS company or an AI company or a UCaaS company or multiple facets of that, we want to deliver an AI-powered customer intelligence platform,” said Finch. “It is the overarching element that encompasses all the products (contact center, unified communications, voice/video meetings, messaging, and more) across our existing TrueCaas platform.”
The coming together of customer and employee facing workflows combined with AI enables businesses to streamline workflows. For example, it’s common to have marketing reach out to customers with promotions or special incentives. If the customer calls into the contact center for an issue and inquires about the promotion, the agent is often left hanging as the agent systems have no knowledge of marketing activities.
I recently experienced this myself with one of the airlines I fly. I was making a flight change and asked about an e-mail promo I received, and the agent had not heard of it. By combing the systems and applying AI, the agent would not only have been able to talk knowledgeably about it, but the AI could offer recommendations on a flight or vacation I might be interested in from my history. Many companies are looking to shift the contact center from being a cost center into a profit center but the agents can’t be the integration point for the data.
AI-powered Customer Intelligence Platform combines several Dialpad products in one place: Ai Contact Center, Ai Sales, Ai Voice, Ai Meetings, and Ai Messaging. As the name implies, Ai Contact Center is designed for contact center agents and it provides omnichannel support for voice and digital.
Ai Sales drives revenue and sales productivity through coaching and sentiment analysis. Ai Voice is an AI-based phone system that integrates with Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others. Ai Meetings enables secure collaboration from anywhere. AI Messaging offers chat and unlimited text messaging capabilities.
“Having this unified toolkit for an AI-powered workplace is important. For us, every call matters, every interaction matters,” said Finch.
AI Provides Better Automation and Information Flow
The new platform enables three key elements of “AI at work,” Finch added.
First, there’s Ai Automation or providing information to different users within an organization, so they can do their jobs better. Second is Ai Assist, which involves helping contact center agents provide better customer service through suggested responses, real-time coaching, and automated compliance. Third, Ai insights is about understanding interactions (customer satisfaction scores or CSAT), optimization, revenue predictions, and engagement.
Earlier this year, Dialpad launched a real-time predictive engine for customer satisfaction dubbed Ai CSAT, which analyzes every customer call to collect feedback. Rather than having customers fill out post-call surveys, it uses AI to obtain CSAT metrics from voice conversations. More recently, Dialpad rolled out a conversational search engine called Ai Agent Assist, which handles complex customer inquiries. Both are examples of how Dialpad is enabling capabilities that are uniquely AI-based.
Dialpad has a few other things in the pipeline. It’s working on a net promoter score (NPS), an important customer experience metric that businesses use to understand the likelihood of a customer recommending their service or product to others. Dialpad is also encouraging organizations to use its low-code capabilities to develop on the platform. While it already has an out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce, other native integrations are coming soon, including HubSpot.
The business landscape is now highly competitive, and customers have little patience for brands that can’t offer the highest level of customer service. Companies have relied heavily on manual integration of data, but things change too fast for this to be possible. Bringing together customer and employee communication tools is a good start but AI is now needed to find those key insights that enable constant innovation.
