Lifesize Adds Automation to Contact Center Solution
Partners with Omilia to bring conversational AI to its CxEngage platform
Cloud-based collaboration solution provider Lifesize is partnering with artificial intelligence (AI) vendor Omilia to drive more automation into contact centers.
The Lowdown: The partnership announced this month follows hard on the heels of a similar move by robotic process automation (RPA) provider Blue Prism, which unveiled its Service Assist technology that automates many of the tasks performed in contact centers.
The Details: Contact centers are often the first point of contact for customers, and the push for more automation is driven by the desire to free representatives from routine tasks to enable them to better interact with customers and address high-level issues.
Lifesize, based in Austin, Texas, is pairing Omilia’s conversational AI capabilities with its CxEngage platform. Contact centers using the platform will be able to leverage Omilia’s technology to rapidly gauge customer needs and route calls to the appropriate human representatives. It will make handling inbound calls more efficient, improve the customer experience, and drive down the number of misrouted calls.
Lifesize said misrouted calls and transferring customers between call center agents can cost organizations up to $2 million a year.
Omilia’s AI-powered virtual assistant can manage customer care tasks via interactive voice response (IVR), web chatbots, social media, and messaging platforms. The natural language technology can address 24 languages and be customized for industries like financial services, insurance, healthcare, utilities, and travel. In addition, enterprises using CxEngage can use Omilia’s voice biometrics capabilities to authenticate a caller’s identity based on voice patterns in the IVR system.
The Impact: Enterprises are looking to automation technologies to improve operations in contact centers, which can receive 50 million to 100 million calls a year, according to ContactBabel. The market research firm also said that 65% of inbound contact center interactions with customers are still conducted with a live agent on the telephone. Only 10.1% have been shifted to self-service over the phone.
Background: Lifesize is expanding its capabilities at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing work-from-home shift has driven demand for more collaboration capabilities. The company in August bought Kaptivo for digital whiteboard technology. In March it merged with Serenova, a Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) vendor, inheriting its contact center expertise.
Omilia, based in Cyprus, in May announced $20 million in its first round of funding, which came 18 years after it was founded. The company reported that in 2019, its revenue grew more than 100%, with most new customers being based in the United States.
The Buzz: “At Lifesize, we recognize that quality customer service often begins and ends with the contact center and is heavily informed by the first customer interaction with a brand,” said Andy Bird, director of product management for contact center solutions at Lifesize. “In Omilia, we’re pleased to have a true partner with the innovative technology to ensure those first interactions are positive building blocks towards the overall customer experience and a more defensible bottom line.”
“Our partnership with Lifesize speaks to our commitment to make advanced conversational AI technology more accessible,” Omilia CEO Dimitris Vassos said. “Companies using the Lifesize CxEngage cloud platform can now provide a customer service experience that makes it easy to engage with a virtual agent while significantly reducing costs. A combination of our unique natural language understanding capabilities, state-of-the-art speech recognition engine, and omnichannel dialogue management platform is advancing our industry, and we are proud to bring the value of our solutions to Lifesize customers.”
Related Links:
CHANNELNOMICS:
>Automating the Contact Center
>Lifesize Buys Kaptivo for Digital Whiteboard Technology
>Lifesize, Serenova Create UCaaS, CCaaS Company
