Talkdesk leans into AI for customer experience automation

Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas, is where customer experience vendors gather to show off the latest and greatest innovation. This year’s show is particularly interesting as artificial intelligence is now in full swing with all vendors that work in the contact center ecosystem.

At the show, cloud contact center provider Talkdesk Inc., rolled out a new platform called Customer Experience Automation or CXA, which involves specialized AI tools or “agents” that work together to manage everything from front-end interactions to back-office tasks. The goal of CXA is to help organizations automate complex customer service workflows using AI.

In a traditional contact center, organizations either had to invest in highly trained teams and niche tools to handle complicated issues or settle for basic automation to complete simple tasks. CXA is Talkdesk’s solution to the problem. The new platform assigns specific jobs to AI agents that share context and coordinate with each other. This makes it easier to automate more intricate, cross-functional processes.

“We bring all the complex tasks together under the guise of multi-agent orchestration — tasks that require specialized knowledge of specialized tools can be brought together under a central brain that orchestrates and runs all those things with the customer experience as the primary objective,” Crystal Miceli, senior vice president of product and industry marketing at Talkdesk, said during a pre-briefing.

CXA follows a “discover, build, orchestrate and measure” process, which starts by identifying issues in current customer experience, forecast the gains if it gets automated and provides suggestions for fixing them. Instead of relying on code, the platform uses a prompt-based setup for creating AI agents tailored to those issues. With just a few clicks, information technology teams can test and launch the automations they created.

Once the automations are live, CXA monitors their performance to see what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be adjusted to improve the CX. The entire process — discovering opportunities, building workflows, orchestrating AI agents and measuring results — is driven by agentic AI. It actively analyzes data, acts and continues to learn and improve over time by pulling in context from customer relationship management and other industry-specific systems.

“We’ve got the understanding of what shifts the mood from highly negative to highly positive or from frustrated to gratified. We’ve got the ability to build new knowledge based on this incredible store of interaction data combined with connections to CRM and systems of record, and we’re applying our own models on top of those very industry-specific ones,” said Miceli. “This allows us to hit the most complex use cases in healthcare, financial services, travel, and so on, because we know what they are.”

Miceli shared an example of a use case in the travel industry where a customer calls in after missing a connecting flight. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot going on, such as rebooking the flight, checking the customer’s loyalty status, updating gate information and much more. Currently, all of that is handled by separate systems and customer service teams, making the customer feel detached and frustrated. CXA connects all those moving parts, so the customer is taken care of from start to finish and not bounced around between agents and automated systems.

CXA is already live in Talkdesk’s Industry Experience Clouds, which focus on the most challenging sectors like healthcare, financial services, and utilities. These sectors were the initial focus for Talkdesk because they present major opportunities for automation. Examples include managing healthcare workflows, coordinating home mortgages and handling utility outages — all of which require synchronization across systems and teams.

One early adopter, Las Vegas Valley Water District, is already using components of Customer Experience Automation. The utility, which provides water to the Las Vegas Valley in Southern Nevada, is leveraging AI agents to improve how it manages service outages, coordinates field crews, and issues customer credits.

“The CXA platform essentially replaces the Ascend AI [contact center platform],” said Miceli. “It’s still embedded inside CX Cloud. So, if you’re a CX Cloud customer or contact center customer, you get all of this and it’s immediately accessible. We shifted to interaction-based pricing, so customers can access all our innovations right away.”

CXA helps with an AI problem that has yet to emerge but is coming. Every application, service provider and vendor will create agentic agents to complete specific tasks. While this might seem useful, it could lead to complexity being higher than pre-deployment as each system will focus on its own silo.

Talkdesk CXA orchestrates communications between agents to complete not just a single task, but a complete process. Without this, the use of agentic agents could create a more complex environment than prior to AI.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. 

Image: Talkdesk