What’s the news?
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.
What are new capabilities of AT&T Cloud Contact Center?
- 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.
Why are these enhancements important?
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.
What are people saying?
“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
Where can I find more information?
1 Gartner, Survey Analysis: Digital Maturity in Customer Service, Investments and Impacts, Nadine LeBlanc, Jim Davies, 20 January 2020.
Author Information
Clint brings over 20 years of market research and consulting experience, focused on emerging technology markets. He was co-founder and CEO of Dash Network, an integrated research and digital media firm focused on the CX market, which was acquired by The Futurum Group in 2022. He previously founded Tractica with a focus on human interaction with technology, including coverage of AI, user interface technologies, advanced computing, and other emerging sectors. Acquired by Informa Group, Clint served as Chief Research Officer for Informa’s research division, Omdia, with management and content strategy responsibility, formed by the combination of Tractica, Ovum, IHS Markit Technology, and Heavy Reading.
Clint was previously the founder and President of Pike Research, a leading market intelligence firm focused on the global clean technology industry, which was acquired by Navigant Consulting where he was Managing Director of the Navigant Research business.
Prior to Pike Research, Clint was Chief Research Officer at ABI Research, a New York-based industry analyst firm concentrating on the impact of emerging technologies on global consumer and business markets.
Clint holds a Master of Business Administration in Telecommunications Management from the University of Dallas and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington & Lee University.
