In our highly competitive economic environment, today’s enterprises know they need to go the extra mile when it comes to delivering an exceptional standard of customer service. After all, with today’s super-savvy consumers recognizing the enormous power they wield in the marketplace, investment in customer experience is likely to pay off massively further down the line.
So for enterprises doing a lot of their business over the phone, it makes perfect sense for them to offer the best possible calling experience. This is even more pertinent given that research firm Metrigy reported during 2022 that 85 percent of customers prefer to communicate with contact centers using voice.
An informative case study recently published by Microsoft highlights just how well Netherlands-based Rabobank, a multinational bank headquartered in Utrecht with more than 40,000 employees worldwide, understands the importance of this new commercial reality.
According to the case study, Rabobank have pioneered a customer service strategy known as “conversational banking”, which is focused on providing friendly, personalized and prompt service to callers. In line with this overall vision, the bank decided to replace their separate virtual agent chatbot and interactive voice response (IVR) systems with a modern, cloud-based conversational platform.
To accomplish this goal, the ideal virtual agent solution from Rabobank’s perspective would be an open platform allowing the easy integration of new services when necessary.
Rabobank selected Microsoft Power Virtual Agents (PVA), a bot framework that enables non-coders to build chatbots quickly and easily without having to put specialized chatbot developers on the payroll.
Adopting Microsoft PVA allowed Rabobank to simplify operations, reduce costs and offer a better, more cohesive experience for customers. However, because Microsoft PVA cannot yet be used to create voicebots, Rabobank had to add another element into the mix for full voice coverage.
And that element is the AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect solution.
Rabobank PVA Architecture Diagram
VoiceAI Connect Enterprise is a fully featured solution intended for any organization seeking to automate its customer service with voicebots, and can easily be tailored to suit specific needs and deployment options. It integrates with the customer’s contact center, public telephony networks (PSTN), enterprise communication platforms (UC) and web-based communications, and is packed with powerful capabilities like agent assistance, outbound calling, call recording and more.
In addition, VoiceAI Connect Enterprise is vendor agnostic, which means that it can connect to any bot framework, any speech service, any third-party voice application, any provider or any contact center, whether on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud.
VoiceAI Connect Enterprise allows legacy contact center environments to be modernized quickly and easily without being forced to migrate to the cloud before they are ready. This type of CX innovation is completely sustainable and can radically transform your contact center before, during and after migration. In this way, AudioCodes supports a seamless migration of your voicebot from your on-premises platform to any new cloud platform.
By the way, there is also a SaaS version of this innovative solution called VoiceAI Connect Cloud. Here, a simple wizard makes it a piece of cake for non-coders to convert a chatbot built with Microsoft PVA into a fully functioning voicebot in just a few clicks.
In fact, Microsoft themselves have long been happy to recommend VoiceAI Connect to Microsoft PVA customers who want to voice-enable their bots. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Check out this blog post to see how Microsoft experts taught attendees at the Microsoft Power Platform Conference how to build their own voicebots with Microsoft PVA and VoiceAI Connect.
As Microsoft’s case study makes clear, AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect Enterprise is a vital part of Rabobank’s new customer service solution. So if providing an unbeatable customer service experience is also a top priority for your organization, why not get started on your voicebot journey right away with Microsoft PVA and VoiceAI Connect?