Dialpad Adds Agent Empowerment to its Portfolio of Contact Center AI Capabilities SiliconANGLE

Dialpad Inc. Monday announced several new artificial intelligence capabilities for its contact center solution.

The new features fall under the Agent Empowerment Suite designed to make contact center supervisors, managers and agents more productive by equipping them with tools that lead directly to a better customer experience. CX improvement has been a major initiative for contact centers as customer experience is now the primary brand differentiator and many customer interactions begin in the contact center.

This release of Agent Empowerment includes the following features:

• Dialpad Ai Agent Support uses a combination of artificial intelligence and productivity tools to empower agents to have more productive conversations. Although Ai Agent Assist is positioned as a single tool, it includes several functions, including knowledge ingestion, AI-driven response shortcuts, smart scripts and workflows, and automation tools . A good way to think of Ai Agent Assist is that it turns agents into super agents by making sure they always have the right information in front of them. Typically, agents need to spend time browsing knowledge bases and serving as an integration point for multiple systems. This leads to the long wait times that we don’t all like for contact center calls. Dialpad provides quantifiable data to customers using the feature. Some notable features include a 99% successful response rate to customer inquiries, 66% average call handling time, and a 40% reduction in the time it takes to onboard new agents.
• Dialpad Ai Quality Assurance Scorecards Allow supervisors and administrators to log calls and share them with agents in real time. The agent can use the information to improve performance, which has an obvious CX improvement component, but also helps with compliance and quality assurance. With the next upcoming release, Dialpad will automate timecard phrases and behaviors and pre-populate them for faster call review.

These types of tools are important today as companies run contact centers in hybrid mode. Three-quarters of contact center managers I surveyed recently told me they would keep agents in hybrid mode indefinitely. By allowing agents to work from home, companies have access to talent outside of driving distance to the contact center and can tailor shifts to suit people’s lifestyles.

For example, a stay-at-home parent may work while their child is in school. I recently spoke to a large insurance company who told me that they are actively poaching top agents from their competitors because they are no longer bound by the physical geography creating the competitive dynamics of contact centers.

There is also a large pool of contact center talent. Historical contact center agent churn rates are around 30%. Over the past year, companies have reported that agent churn has more than doubled, increasing the talent pool.

Companies have the opportunity to hone their talents, but agents want to work for companies where they know they will succeed. Companies that hire new agents but then give those people legacy tools will likely see higher churn than those with modern tools, such as Dialpad AI capabilities. Indeed, it exposes the agent to the risk of dissatisfied customers venting their frustrations on them.

Dashboards address an issue that has become common in the age of hybrid working: managing remote agents. With older call centers, the supervisor could walk around the room and listen to calls that were going bad, then jump on the call to listen and then coach the agent. With working from home, this is obviously not possible.

Every contact center I’ve spoken to about hybrid working has told me they need better tools for supervisors because management today is very different than it was two years ago. . I would say that AI-powered tools provide superior management even for agents in the office because a supervisor cannot listen to every call like the AI ​​engine does.

For Dialpad, these features are part of its larger AI journey. Earlier this year, he launched AI DISCUSS, which infers customer satisfaction with every call. Most contact center vendors have chosen to partner with third-party AI companies that bring conversational AI, analytics, or other capabilities to this area. Dialpad bucked this trend and built AI capabilities in-house using talent from acquisitions such as Kare and Koopid. This gives Dialpad much more control over feature release, roadmap, and integrations rather than having to assemble capabilities through partnerships.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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