Vonage Launches New Virtual Assistant

Vonage has announced the launch of its Contact Center AI Virtual Assistant to help organizations improve customer experience and manage contact volumes.

The announcement will be good news for many contact centres that have been hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, with Vonage’s Virtual Assistant being much easier to implement than most.

“We helped a client set up a Virtual Assistant from the moment that we got their urgent request, which was on a Friday, and we were live with the chatbot answering hundreds of calls on the Monday,” says Noam Fine, Head of AI Applications at Vonage.

However, this speedy implementation process does not impact the quality of Vonage’s offering, which is much more advanced than many of the temperamental, script-based models – which include very little artificial intelligence – that are also on the market.

We’ve all had bad experiences with these chatbots, but fortunately Vonage’s Virtual Assistant model is built around the idea of improving customer experience, not just cutting costs and managing contact volumes.

“Our Virtual Assistant can help the customer experience, in terms of removing outdated IVR processes, eliminating wait times and so on – but it is also designed to support the contact centre team,” continues Noam.

“If the Virtual Assistant passes on a query to an agent, all the information that it collects is passed on too, helping them solve the customer’s problem. It also stops the customer from having to repeat themselves.”

The process that Noam describes above can work really well to reduce handling times and boost First Contact Resolution (FCR) and is great for removing that classic customer gripe of not feeling listened to.

The solution can be deployed through both voice and messaging channels, helping to provide enhanced self-service interactions that engage every caller in natural language – not the stereotypical, robotic language that is often associated with the technologies.

Easy to Integrate

We’ve discussed many of the advantages of Vonage’s Virtual Assistant’s solution already, one of which was the speedy implementation time. This is made possible by the solution’s easy integration capabilities.

While Vonage has a whole host of its own highly regarded contact centre solutions, its Virtual Assistant also integrates with other platforms – including Salesforce.

“Connecting our Virtual Assistant with your CRM will allow the easy transfer of customer information, allowing us to offer various forms of personalization and again enabling us to improve customer experience,” says Noam.

On this theme of improving customer experience, the Virtual Assistant will also enable you to offer 24-hour support.

“Vonage’s AI Virtual Assistant enables organizations to easily manage high call volumes while delivering the best possible customer experience,” adds Jay Patel, Chief Product Officer for Vonage.

In these difficult times, that is no doubt an alluring prospect to many contact centres.

Final Thoughts

There has been so much talk about the difficulties that contact centres have faced in recent times. But solutions like Vonage’s Virtual Assistant can be so helpful for ensuring business continuity – especially amongst organizations with high call volumes.

While the contact centre queue is peaking, simple tasks can be offset by the AI-driven conversations and voice-enabled self-service capabilities of Vonage’s Virtual Assistant.

Not only this, but your business insights will be increased – while automating either entire conversations or at least the beginning, which helps to make things a little easier for advisors.

All of this drives down costs, as advisors have to handle fewer calls and – when they are called into action – will have lower handling times.

For the customer, wait times are reduced, straightforward queries are immediately resolved and customer satisfaction will likely be increased.

The solution is designed to improve business, customer and advisor results. It’s a win-win-win!

Download the datasheet to learn more about how Vonage Contact Center AI Virtual Assistant can help your business better respond to peaks in call volumes.