Microsoft Presents New AI Features For Call Center Services

Microsoft, which supports ChatGPT OpenAI creators, is bringing AI technology to a number of business areas with what it calls Copilot technology. This technology is able to summarize emails and create PowerPoint slides as part of the company's Office software package.

But by bringing Copilot to the call center, Microsoft will put its technology into a realm where they are not dominant players, hoping to gain the lead against competitors like Salesforce.com and Zoom.

For customer support tasks, this new AI tool will be able to explore the company's manuals and aid materials to train chatbots with a better answer to questions that customers may ask in chat windows. "Many of these tasks are automated, and Microsoft hopes to make them better," said Jeff Comstock, vice president of corporate Dynamics 365 Customer Service at Microsoft.

But the real benefits are expected to be felt by human customer service agents serving phone calls. These agents often sit in front of computers with multiple open apps at once - many of which are obsolete and slow - while trying to find information to help customers.

Comstock says Microsoft tools will aim to retrieve all that information so customer service agents can navigate the app they need in natural language to get answers faster and easier.

"The service room, unfortunately, is full of heavy and boring work. There are a lot of tools, and they have to use a lot of processes just to do the most basic tasks. This is a brutal experience," Comstock said. "So, our goal is to help them in the workflow to reduce that tough and boring job."

Microsoft said the new contact center software will be available on July 1.