Talkdesk announces Virtual Agent, the first of 20 product announcements in 2020 to improve customer experience and agent engagement

Talkdesk® announced Virtual Agent, a new product delivering artificial intelligence to customer self-service applications. Virtual Agent, powered by Talkdesk iQ, is a conversational, intelligent assistant deployed on the voice channel allowing businesses to serve customers even when the contact centre is closed.

Virtual Agent leverages a voice-enabled chatbot, knowledge base and text-to-speech technologies to deliver a human-like service, improving customer satisfaction with around the clock, intelligent conversational support to solve issues effortlessly without agent interaction.

The dialogue between businesses and their customers has changed, with empowered customers now dictating when they want service and communicating through their preferred channels. According to Gartner, 31 percent of chief information officers have deployed or, plan to deploy, virtual customer assistants in their enterprises; up 10 percent from 2018. The infusion of AI in the customer service industry, most notably through Talkdesk iQ powered solutions, strengthens self-service capabilities with deeper, real-time reporting and analytics to show patterns and offer insights to customer experience leaders and teams.

“Virtual Agent provides relief for contact centres that are overwhelmed with customer inquiries and issues,” said Tiago Paiva, chief executive officer, Talkdesk. “We are excited to bring our customers an AI-driven customer service application that will make contact centres smarter by addressing customer needs with an automated agent that is constantly learning, reducing the number of calls and freeing agents to address more complex service calls.”

Unlike other virtual agents that provide rudimentary voice experiences and rely on third party AI technology, Talkdesk’s Virtual Agent is natively built in the cloud and learns from interactions to deliver human-like experience and improved customer journeys. Virtual Agent is ideal for solving common issues and automating routine tasks when agents are not available after hours, or to free agents during peak traffic periods, allowing them to focus on more complex issues. Using CRM data, interactions are personalized and integrated with ticketing systems to create cases and schedule callbacks when an agent becomes available. Contact centres are able to improve operational efficiencies by solving issues without agent interaction and improve self-service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by shortening the amount of time required for customers to receive answers and resolve issues.

The announcement of Virtual Agent is the first of an ambitious program to storm the contact centre industry by starting 2020 with 20 product introductions. Talkdesk has built its reputation as an industry disruptor through a rapid pace of innovation that has brought more than 600 features to the market over the past 18 months. This pace continues as Talkdesk aims to fully reveal its aggressive 20-in-20 plan at Opentalk® 2020, the premier customer experience (CX) event of the year.

The Talkdesk 20-in-20 program rolls out in a series of announcements beginning with Virtual Assistant, continues with a steady cadence of market-disrupting announcements and concludes in April with significant news, disclosures and celebrations at Opentalk 2020, April 22-23, at Pier 35 in San Francisco, CA. This annual event brings together dozens of speakers and thousands of attendees for a thought-provoking conference focused on the customer experience industry. Opentalk 2020 attendees are immersed in the insightful viewpoints of innovative leaders and experts driving the customer experience revolution. Featuring two days of sessions designed for CX practitioners, contact centre leaders, information technology (IT) professionals and the Talkdesk user community, Opentalk 2020 is the conference to learn best practices and trends from thought-leaders and peers within the CX industry.

“Talkdesk innovates faster, and delivers more value to our customers, than any other contact centre solution provider. In just the past two years Talkdesk has introduced more than 600 features, including 200 patents, which paved the way for the 20-in-20 release,” said Charanya Kannan, chief product officer, Talkdesk. “The commitment to innovation is a constant at Talkdesk and embodies our desire to be one step ahead and make possible the seemingly impossible. It is in our corporate DNA, sets us apart and puts Talkdesk at the forefront of the contact centre solutions industry.”

About Talkdesk

Talkdesk Enterprise Cloud Contact Center empowers companies to make customer experience their competitive advantage. With enterprise-class performance and consumer-like ease of use, Talkdesk easily adapts to the evolving needs of sales and support teams and their end-customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction, productivity and cost savings. Over 1,800 innovative enterprises around the world including 2U, Canon, IBM, Peloton and Trivago, rely on Talkdesk to power their customer interactions.

Learn more and request a demo at www.talkdesk.com.