Microsoft recently hosted the first annual Microsoft Power Platform Conference (MPPC), with the goal of empowering everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace with the Microsoft Power Platform. Around 4,000 attendees were treated to a wide variety educational sessions, hands-on workshops, community networking and much more, all led by the best Power Platform thought leaders from Microsoft, their partners, community experts and customers from around the world.
And AudioCodes was there.
The Customer is King
In today’s supercharged economy, enterprises know that they must deliver a superior yet economically viable customer experience at all times to stay ahead of their competition. One way to do this is to offer self-service and automation in contact center customer service by deploying chatbots. In fact, this has proven so successful that it has also been extended to additional stakeholders such as sales and HR.
However, building and integrating chatbots has traditionally been quite a complicated endeavor, usually requiring a high degree of coding knowledge. So does this mean that organizations without coding experts on their payroll have to miss out on everything that chatbots have to offer?
As we learned at MPPC, not anymore. Not by a long shot.
Chatbots the Easy Way
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents (PVA), an integral part of the Microsoft Power Platform, is a bot framework for creating chatbots quickly and easily, without having to blow the entire hiring budget on expensive, specialized chatbot developers. This intuitive platform makes it possible for quite literally any organization to build powerful chatbots that can answer questions asked by their customers, other employees or visitors to their website.
The sheer simplicity of Microsoft PVA was made crystal-clear at MPPC, where Microsoft experts ran a series of well-attended and very well-received labs to take an audience of non-coders step-by-step through the process of building their own chatbot. These budding chatbot builders were an eclectic mix of Microsoft partners and consultants working for service providers, as well as customers from a wide range of industries. Yet they had something very important in common at MPPC – these “non-coders” all succeeded in building a bot and they all found the process pretty easy.
We Need to Talk
But although chatbots are a great place to start when it comes to boosting customer satisfaction scores, forward-thinking organizations instinctively understand that a huge chunk of the population still prefers to communicate by voice – and this is backed up by the statistics.
In their CX Technology Trends report from May 2021, research firm Metrigy found that 85 percent of customers choose to communicate with contact centers in this way. Furthermore, 81 percent of companies surveyed said that they currently enable transfer to voice in their digital channels.
With this in mind, and to avoid being left behind in the customer service revolution, such organizations are keen to go one step further and exploit the incredible business potential of voicebots. However, at the moment, Microsoft PVA cannot be used to create them.
Luckily, as we discovered from the Microsoft team at MPPC, this is exactly where AudioCodes comes into the picture as a trusted Microsoft partner – with our VoiceAI Connect Cloud solution.
- BONUS: Check out our joint webinar with Microsoft: Give VOICE to Microsoft Power Virtual Agents
A Warm Welcome for VoiceAI Connect Cloud
AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect Cloud is a SaaS self-service portal for easily extending bot usability to telephony use cases, enabling the smooth implementation of virtual agent, conversational/smart IVR and agent assist applications. Once you’ve built a chatbot with Microsoft PVA, VoiceAI Connect Cloud’s simple wizard lets you convert it into a voicebot in just a few clicks.
VoiceAI Connect Cloud is agnostic, so it can connect to any bot framework, any speech service, any provider or any contact center, whether on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud. Even legacy contact center environments can be modernized without risking the original investment in their platform.
So if you’re looking to take your customer experience to another level with voicebots, why not give Microsoft PVA and AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect Cloud a try?
