Talkdesk today announced its Enterprise Contact Center Winter 19 release, the latest version of its contact center solution, which aims to enable contact centers to provide personalized and contextualized experiences in every conversation, regardless of channel or device.
“Basically everything we are building at Talkdesk right now is designed to personalize the customer experience and use context to drive the experience that those customers have,” says Lori Stout, senior product marketing manager at Talkdesk. “With this new release, we’re expanding that to make sure that that context travels along with the customer and that interaction, in every conversation no matter which channel the customer chooses to contact the business in or what device they choose to use to communicate.”
The new version offers four key features, the first of which is improving engagement in any channel. Its Talkdesk Omnichannel feature, powered by the Talkdesk iQ underlying AI infrastructure, is now embedded in Callbar, the company’s free-floating agent interface, ensuring that the context of interactions—contact history, purchase history, open support tickets, and the like—remains with customers as they move from channel to channel. Expanded capabilities include social listening, presenting agents with high-priority social media posts, and a synchronized view of SMS, live chat, and app messaging interactions.
“Now there’s only one interface for agents to work in, regardless of which channel they’re communicating with customers in,” Stout explains. “We’ve also added social listening so now agents have the ability to prioritize social media posts that might need immediate attention…[as well as] a synchronized view of all of these channels so that agents can see the whole picture of that customer journey instead of moving from interface to interface to see different pieces of the interaction by channel.”
The second key feature is the ability to easily personalize customer journeys with Talkdesk Studio, the company’s intelligent routing flow designer, also powered by Talkdesk iQ. New capabilities include optimized workflows, multilingual speech-to-text functionality, and editing tools for contact center administrators.
“For this release, we’ve really simplified the user interface so that a non-technical user can go in and create IVRs and call flows in a matter of seconds without using a single line of code. It’s easy to drag and drop the parts of the call flow to design a complex flow,” Stout elaborates.
The third key feature is the ability to control any device with Callbar. New universal device support protects current device investments and saves the cost of virtual desktops while allowing contact centers to choose an SIP or external device.
“That’s important to some contact centers who’ve already made an investment in SIP devices and want to reuse them and bring them over to the Talkdesk platform. They can now use Callbar with those devices,” Stout says.
The fourth feature is the ability to protect current telephony investments with Talkdesk xConnect. xConnect allows IT teams to connect Talkdesk to an existing PBX and/or carrier. This can provide superior resiliency and geographic coverage for contact centers that elect to retain their current contracts.
“If we bring on a new customer and they have an existing contract with a carrier or a PBX, they can preserve that contract and still have all of the benefits of using Talkdesk,” Stout says.
The winter 19 release also includes new enterprise security features. Enhanced SAML 2.0 support allows access to Talkdesk using any third-party authentication system that is SAML 2.0 compliant. In addition, expanded PCI tools ensure that neither Talkdesk nor the agent has access to credit card information in agent-assisted payments.