Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. Leading off this week, we highlight: RingCentral's RingEX now includes AI Assistant at no additional cost, Moveworks's launch of Agentic AI-powered enterprise search, Calabrio's debut two AI solutions for quality management in the contact center, Zingly's new AI solution for financial services, Kustomer's AI Agent customer service platform, the Lenovo-Cisco collaboration for hybrid work and, finally, the general availability of Salesforce's Agentforce.
In reports this week, we summarize a case study published by Amazon Connect featuring Rhythm Energy, as well as several surveys: Riskonnect's findings that only 8% of companies are prepared for AI-related risks; Five9's survey that consumers prefer talking to people; a Forethought survey that highlights growing consumer comfort with AI-powered service ... but they still want to talk to people; and an EY survey that found that 51% of telecom and broadband customers prefer the call center.
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RingCentral announced that its AI Assistant, is now included in RingEX at no additional cost. AI Assistant runs on RingCentral’s platform for calling, messaging, SMS, and video conferencing, and provides various features:
“Many UCaaS and CCaaS platform providers have generative AI capabilities infused throughout their platforms, however there are no metrics to compare how well different vendors’ AI works,” said Brent Kelly, Principal Analyst, Digital Workplace, Omdia. “I’ve used most of the UCaaS meeting transcription and summary solutions on the market. The transcription from RingCentral AI Assistant was amazingly accurate for the duration of an hour-long meeting. The summary was also very well crafted.”
AI Assistant is included at no additional cost in RingEX starting in the U.S., with additional skills and an international rollout planned for early 2025.
The provider of an AI copilot for search and automation introduced Moveworks Enterprise Search which uses an ‘agentic AI’-based Reasoning Engine that uses large language models (LLMs) and machine learning (ML) models to apply reasoning and decision-making techniques, via the agentic framework, in response to human queries. For example, the Reasoning Engine goes through three steps: understanding, planning and executing. Understanding involves establishing the business context of the query, planning involves identifying the best plugins or tools to accomplish the task/query and executing means following through on the plan.
When Moveworks Enterprise Search delivers query results to the user, it will cite its findings. Moveworks integrates with “any” system of record and supports granular permissions and access controls for users.
The provider of the workforce performance announced the general availability of Auto QM and Trending Topics. Auto QM feature uses AI to automate the evaluation of 100% of customer interactions, across criteria such as empathy, professional language, conversation flow management, and the hold/transfer process. Managers/supervisors can view scores by agent group or team, and then drill-down to pinpoint coaching needs. Overall performance metrics are accessed via a new dashboard and individual contact details through the media player.
Trending Topics uses AI to generate topics and metrics related to the contact center’s performance such as top customer inquiries, the success of interventions like performance coaching and it supports user-defined phrase categories.
The provider of AI and CX solutions announced a suite of AI solutions for banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) institutions. The suite of products include Relationship AI, Rooms, Gen AI Buddy, Reporting and Analytics, Integrations, and Gen AI Assist. Zingly Rooms provides a persistent digital space for customer interactions across chat, voice, video, text, documents, etc. GenAI Buddy is a customer-facing AI agent built on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that can autonomously manage routine tasks and inquiries by using an organization's own data from sources like CRM systems, product catalogs, and banking systems. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and conversational intelligence, Relationship AI can identify intent signals and customer value and then escalate high-value interactions to human agents. Agent Copilot uses Gen AI to provide human agents with real-time summaries, suggested next steps and insights based on the interaction history and data stored within Rooms.
Analyst and frequent No Jitter contributor Zeus Kerravala wrote about Zingly here and here.
The customer service solution provider launched an AI native platform for omnichannel customer service which includes a suite of ‘SMART AI Agents’ for Customers (available now), Reps and Leaders (the latter two agents will be available soon). These AI Agents, powered by Kustomer’s proprietary Kustomer IQ (KIQ) technology, built on the latest LLMs, can work both autonomously and alongside human agents. The AI Agents are configured in Kustomer’s AI Agent Studio where they can be customized for tasks, language, tone and access to knowledge bases, tools, and channels. Kustomer also introduced Kustomer AI Voice, a native, AI-powered voice channel that allows businesses to offer human-like voice interactions without third-party integrations.
Kustomer does not offer seat-based pricing, instead it offers a ‘conversation-based’ approach in which businesses only pay for what they use, and all AI capabilities are included at no extra cost. For example, AI Voice is included at no additional cost other than standard telephony usage.
The two companies launched several new products including Truscale Meeting Room as a Service (TS MRaaS) and TruScale WorkSmart, among others. Lenovo TruScale is a pay-as-you-go model its infrastructure, devices and storage products. TruScale MRaaS, then, is a managed service that uses Cisco’s suite of Collaboration Devices and Lenovo’s end-to-end support and monitoring services. The TruScale WorkSmart solution integrates Lenovo’s Digital Workplace Solutions (DWS) with Cisco’s networking, collaboration, and security portfolio. AI comes in with Lenovo’s ‘Care of One’ generative AI-based platform that allows personalization via ‘user persona’ identification, configuration and orchestration.
Announced at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce Agentforce Service Agent and Agent Builder are now generally available to all customers. Service Agent is a customer-facing autonomous AI agent that provides self-service across any channel — like voice, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and websites. Agent Builder is used to set up, activate and customize out-of-the-box agents or build new agents. Agent Builder uses low code/no code, enables access to structured and unstructured data from Data Cloud and uses existing tools like Salesforce Flows, Prompts, Apex, and MuleSoft APIs to configure an agent.
For more on Agentforce, see No Jitter’s coverage here.
This AWS blog post details some of the benefits Rhythm Energy, a retail electricity provider based in Houston, Texas, realized by migrating to Amazon Connect for its customer service operations in September 2022. The blog notes that by December 2022, the company had ported over all its workflows, and in January 2023, it went into full production with Amazon Connect.
Per the post, Rhythm optimized its IVR for natural language and made it easier for customers to connect with customer service via chat. As a result, chat volume increased 600% and by “engaging via chat, we can send links to our self-service solutions, so that next time, customers have the link readily available,” said Jennifer Schmitt, Senior Director of Operations and Customer Care at Rhythm Energy.
The company expects to realize a 40% cost savings compared to its previous solution suite, thanks to the Amazon Connect pay-as-you-go pricing model and consolidation of capabilities into a single customer experience application. Rhythm can also launch new channels and innovate customer experience quickly with the self-serve IVR and agent queueing.
According to Matt Camilli, Head of Engineering at Rhythm Energy. “The vision is to have a fully integrated system where our customer segmentation, campaign design, and profile data all speak the same language, enabling us to deliver a seamless and personalized experience across all touchpoints.”
According to Riskonnect’s 2024 New Generation of Risk Report, 8% of companies feel prepared for AI and AI-governance risks. Just 19% of organizations have formally trained or briefed their entire organization on generative AI risks, and only 16% say they have a budget specifically directed at mitigating AI-related risks. Eighty percent of surveyed organizations said they don’t have a dedicated plan to address generative AI risks, including AI-driven fraud attacks. The research is based on a global survey of more than 200 risk, compliance, and resilience professionals.
According to a Five9 study, 84% of consumers are aware that some companies use AI to handle customer service interactions yet nearly half (48%) of consumers say they do not trust information provided by AI-powered customer service bots. However, 63% of Gen Zers and 60% of Millennials say they trust information provided by AI-powered customer service bots. Gen Z is less likely to prefer talking to a real human in-person or over the phone for customer support (66%) compared to Gen X (76%) and Baby Boomers / the Silent Generation (86%).
This research was conducted in partnership with TEAM LEWIS, who surveyed 4,000 general consumers across the US and UK. All respondents were 18 or older, and the sample was census-balanced by age and gender. TEAM LEWIS collected data through an online survey fielded from September 25 through September 30, 2024. The survey respondents were independently sourced from Cint, a global market research panel provider.
According to a survey conducted by Forethought, 48% of surveyed U.S. consumers believe that AI chatbots have made customer service more helpful. However, only 32% of Baby Boomers said this, compared to 56% of Millennials. Nineteen percent of Gen Z and 14% of Millennials ranked having to talk to someone on the phone to resolve their issue as a top 3 frustration related to customer service – but the lack of an option to connect to a human was cited as the ‘number one’ frustration related to customer service.
The results are from two online surveys. One survey of 1,091 US adults aged 18 and up was fielded from September 20 to 23, 2024 One survey of 1,136 US adults aged 18 and up was fielded from October 4 to 7, 2024. The data was weighted to the US population by 9 demographic questions. The credibility interval for questions answered by all respondents is +/- 4 percentage points.
According to EY’s latest Decoding the Digital Home study, which focuses on the digital home and providers of telecom and broadband services, 57% of surveyed consumers believe they can’t properly communicate an issue unless they talk to a human agent. Forty-seven percent of households on average find that chatbots are less effective than expected, while 52% simply don’t think instant messaging is suitable for complex queries.
The report found that while households appreciate the potential of chatbots to support them, they prefer the call center (51%) for customer support outreach, while instant messaging is favored by just 12%. Preference for the call center is particularly pronounced in South Korea (66%), Spain (60%) and Canada (57%).
EY surveyed 20,000 consumers on their attitudes toward technology, media and telecoms experienced in the home across 10 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US. It was conducted in July and August 2024. EY’s study is designed to build a deeper understanding of changing consumer behavior and attitudes involving technology, media and telecommunications products and services in the home.
In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:
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