Verizon launches new AI-based tools to boost customer interactions

Verizon today launched a world-class suite of solutions that blends human and artificial intelligence to enhance the customer engagement experience. Digital Customer Experience (CX) is an end-to-end managed service that deploys automation into enterprise and business owner’s customer experience tools.

Through Digital CX, consumers who contact a business – whether on social media, chat, email, text, or over the phone – will receive personalized experiences based on past interactions that are delivered through a mobile-first interface; allowing customer service representatives to access information seamlessly between platforms 24/7. The solution provides a deliberate method of collecting insights, learning from them, and quickly developing efficiencies.

“Every year, the experiences people have with business are becoming more personalized and tailored. Consumers increasingly want digital and intuitive self-serve support options on the channels that they prefer to use, and they challenge businesses to deliver,” said Alla Reznik, director of customer experience, global products and services, Verizon. “Digital CX will give businesses one comprehensive solution to address this need today while also helping to prepare them to grow and evolve with their customer demands over time.”

The promise of integrating AI into customer service has industry analysts predicting exponential growth. “IDC has estimated that within the next year, 40% of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services, as will 75% of enterprise applications by 2021 (IDC Predictions Provide a Blueprint and Key Building Blocks for Becoming a Digital Native Enterprise, 2017). AI is fundamental to the evolving customer experience,” said IDC’s Mary Wardley, program vice president, loyalty and customer care. “Companies are recognizing the market advantage that AI-powered customer care represents. Verizon’s Digital CX is designed to help those companies harness AI and take their customer service to the next level.

Digital CX is made up of four solutions that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year:

• Virtual Agent: The Virtual Agent uses AI to incorporate intelligence that can solve for customer challenges on the spot. The chatbot is smart enough to know what it knows and what it doesn’t, and it escalates more complex issues to live agents when needed, without losing any of the situational context.
• Live Agent: Digital CX’s Live Agent feature can be used as stand-alone solution facilitating communication via text, voice, or video or can utilize standard connectors to other contact center agent desktop applications such as Virtual Contact Center or Unified Customer Experience. Whether end users are reaching out over a website chat, messaging applications, or within a mobile application, Live Agent provides the direct connection to your contact center agents enabling them to deliver personalized interactions at critical moments by surfacing the conversation details, website browsing status, and interaction history instantly.
• Knowledge Assist: Knowledge Assist combines intelligent easy-to-use authoring tools with machine learning capability to deliver the most relevant answers and next best action for your agents. Reaching out across internal and external data sources and combining with consumer history, Knowledge Assist helps provide personalized responses to agent inquires.
• Social Engagement: To stay on top of trends and insights across social media, Social Engagement offers monitoring, analysis, and engagement tools on one platform. These tools help businesses surface trending topics posted on social media about their brand, engage influencers, mitigate crises, and run social ad campaigns from a unified dashboard. 

Air Jordan