Skip to main content
Industry

Microsoft and Nuance: Unlocking the contact center of the future

This post is co-authored by Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance

A person looking out the window smiling and talking into a mobile phone.

The disruption of the pandemic has shifted customer service expectations, and for many brands, it has cemented superior customer experiences as one of the most important priorities for their organization.

Today’s consumers have more choices than ever before and can switch brands with ease. They expect organizations to connect with them wherever they are, easily and securely, with an understanding of their individual needs. Organizations that can’t meet these expectations risk dissatisfied customers, or even worse, lost customers. 

For most organizations, delivering on such expectations means improving the contact center experience, both for customers, and the agents who manage customer questions or concerns. Enhancing the customer experience often requires advanced AI, automation, and security in the cloud, while continuing to draw value from existing investments. Ultimately, an enterprise contact center must deliver consistent, personalized, omnichannel customer experiences to deliver exceptional service. 

As individual companies, both Microsoft and Nuance have invested heavily in enhancing the contact center experience. Nuance has focused on how the contact center experience impacts customer satisfaction and has a proven track record of delivering powerful AI-driven customer engagement and agent efficiency solutions that are deployed worldwide, spanning industries including financial services, telecommunications, government, retail, healthcare, and more. In fact, 85 percent of the Fortune 100, including companies like Best Buy, Vodafone, and Humana use Nuance’s best-of-breed conversational AI solutions to support more efficient customer experiences and accelerate business outcomes (figure 1).

Examples of the experiences and outcomes of Nuance’s AI-driven customer engagement and agent efficiency solutions.
Figure 1. Examples of the experiences and outcomes of Nuance’s AI-driven customer engagement and agent efficiency solutions.

Nuance continuously evolves its solution to meet the varied and changing needs of today’s customers. Today’s customer wants more convenience, greater ease of use, and a more seamless contact center experience.

A video thumbnail of Nuance's "We the customers" video on the customer needs for today’s contact center solution.
Video 1. Nuance’s “We the customers” video on the customer needs for today’s contact center solution.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service has also improved the customer engagement experience. It tailors agent experiences to better meet the needs of a customer on their terms, leveraging automation throughout the customer journey, creating a seamless and easy user experience. Between Nuance and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the entire customer engagement is transformed. One of the significant customer benefits with Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a seamless omnichannel experience, providing customers and agents with an exceptional engagement interaction. 

A video thumbnail to learn more about the Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel experience for customers and agents.
Video 2. The Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel experience for customers and agents.

For agents, Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help accelerate issue resolution, strengthen cross-team collaboration, and proactively surface information at the right time to quickly resolve customer issues rapidly. Figure 2 summarizes some exciting customer outcomes from Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Figure 2. Customers have experienced great outcomes by deploying Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Microsoft and Nuance’s customer service solutions have been adopted by some of the world’s most recognized brands across every industry who are already enjoying the benefits of our technologies.

Microsoft and Nuance share a powerful vision to transform contact centers across industries. Together, we will provide AI-driven solutions to engage customers through a variety of voice and digital channels, while simultaneously delivering high levels of automation with innovative customer experiences and business outcomes. Together we hope to provide the most complete and compelling AI-driven customer engagement and contact center portfolio, with secure tools that span no-code, low-code, and pro-code to accelerate transformation. Together we have the Sales and Professional Services teams, channel resellers, and independent software vendor partnerships that magnify our ability to deliver for our customers around the world. Together we believe that the day has come where customer service can be something that consumers—and enterprises—love.

Let’s take a look at what the Microsoft and Nuance AI-driven digital contact center can do for your organization.

Personalize customer experiences and improve agent productivity with AI

AI is fundamental to the success of the contact center and can deliver self-service to customers securely on voice and digital channels, reduce fraud, coach live agents, and automate the post-call wrap-up. Nearly every customer engagement will leverage automation, using industry-specific AI to enable intelligent engagement and personalized customer experiences.

We envision a solution that is seamless and offers customers intuitive self-service experiences in every engagement channel. Human agents are critically important, and the ideal contact center solution requires easy access to customer intelligence and insights, increasing agent productivity and job satisfaction. Agents must be able to become productive faster and work more efficiently, leveraging AI, actionable insights, intelligent case routing, and workflow automation across both legacy and modern services. We envision a simple user interface that is easy to understand and navigate, includes AI-powered knowledge management tools and reduces resolution times for any issue.

Optimize agile operations in the cloud

The cloud is a vital component for a successful contact center strategy as organizations need the ability to make holistic changes quickly, with limited to no downtime, and scale resources to respond to the unexpected. This has resulted in a deeper commitment to cloud transformation. To address this need, Microsoft and Nuance will bring together our proven contact center solutions with scale, compute power, and security.

We aim to seamlessly integrate our contact center solution with existing computing infrastructure and services. We will offer flexible deployment models with the ability to build, purchase, and deploy applications however you need. You can also leverage our specialized teams to build solutions for you. Our solution is comprehensive and should enable admins to easily monitor, control, and optimize specifications as needed. Since our solution comes with low-code development tools, your team can easily customize the solution to meet the needs of your organization. This blend of proven technologies and industry expertise will empower everyone to deliver smarter, more efficient engagements with greater confidence and flexibility.

Safeguard customer interactions with advanced security

We envision a contact center solution that provides secure customer engagements without compromising customer convenience. It will secure customers’ identities through seamless, biometric authentication and intelligent, proactive fraud detection across channels.

Our combined solution will leverage Nuance’s biometrics solutions which have reduced fraud losses, increased customer satisfaction, lowered average handle times, and reduced costs. These capabilities will be infused with the expansive intelligence of the Microsoft Cloud which analyzes 24 trillion threat signals daily, across multiple threat vectors. 

Together, Microsoft and Nuance will offer organizations unparalleled innovation and resources to help fight fraud and cybercrime.

We’re unlocking the contact center of the future with talented teams and partners

Both Microsoft and Nuance believe the collective experience of our teams and our extensive partner ecosystems will create a new vision for the contact center. We’re combining world-class capabilities and professionals with decades of experience working with industry leaders to transform customer engagement. This will bring new perspectives and greater innovation. We’re also bringing together our ecosystems of partners around the world—including contact center partners like Genesys, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, NICE CXone, system integrators, resellers, device partners, and ISVs to support and advise customers with intelligent contact center solutions.

Learn more about the new Microsoft and Nuance contact center vision.

A video thumbnail to learn more how V F Corp is optimizing retail experiences with Microsoft and Nuance.
Video 3. Watch how VF Corp is optimizing retail experiences with Microsoft and Nuance.

Contact your account team for a demo to see what you can achieve. Our vision will continue to evolve to industry needs, leveraging the experience of Nuance’s best-in-class AI, coupled with the focused and rapid development of Microsoft engineers. Be sure to check out our page to learn how you can start building the contact center of the future today.

Learn more about Microsoft and Nuance and our capabilities: