Revolutionizing Customer Interactions with AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big topic that’s been populating media headlines lately. In general, the idea of using it in business has raised a lot of questions and in some cases, fear. I believe this fear simply stems from the fact that AI is a new technology that’s not entirely understood yet.

The reality is that as users begin to experiment with AI and understand more about how it works, they’ll come to embrace it as a tool that enhances their capabilities, helps them do their jobs better, and saves them valuable time in the process. The more they embrace AI, the more powerful they will become as they work smarter and streamline their productivity to put their energy where it matters most: into building strong, lasting business relationships with customers, partners, and even co-workers.

In the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) space, AI is opening up an arena of functionality, enhancing customer interactions and the overall experience like never before. When I was creating net2phone’s product vision several years ago now, I was excited by the possibilities that AI could open for us. It became a pillar of our product roadmap.

We're constantly looking at ways we can provide unique and innovative solutions to our customers that will empower them and enable them to work smarter. We also look internally at our own processes and ways that we handle our own client interactions. Within our own contact center, we started thinking about ways to enhance and streamline manual and repetitive processes that occur after client calls, like summarizing interactions, writing follow-up emails, and providing adequate coaching and feedback for agents.

After looking internally and gathering external feedback and information from our clients and partners about their pain points, we decided to build our own AI tool to take interactions even further. net2phone AI acts as a simple out-of-the-box solution to enhance capabilities and enable contact center agents and supervisors to better understand those interactions.

  ​net2phone AI is a simple, out-of-the-box solution to enhance capabilities and enable contact center agents and supervisors to understand those interactions better.  

First, our tool uploads recordings of client calls made via our CCaaS platform uContact, our UCaaS platform Unite, or any other voice platform that supports API functionality onto our AI engine. From there, it transcribes the calls and provides detailed summaries with any key action items from the calls. From the transcriptions and summaries, AI drafts follow-up emails, ready to be sent. Users are able to simply copy and paste, or make any edits to the emails as they see fit. But the capabilities don’t end there.

Our solution reviews the transcript of the call sentence by sentence and highlights sentiment analysis using AI language models. The tool then analyzes the audio of the call and determines overall tone, even breaking down the conversation bit by bit to determine which percentage is positive, negative, or neutral.

It also provides detailed metrics like talk time, the amount of times agents and customers spoke over each other (overtalk), talk speed, and more. It provides a high-level view of being able to coach and review a call. To streamline tasks even more, we give the capability to easily push it out to other systems such as Zapier and CRM softwares so that you could go ahead and log this in the place of your choice. With this tool, we aim to change the experiences of our customers and how they interact with their own customers.

There are a lot of different AI tools out there, but with most of them, you need to figure out how to embed them into your different communications and they can be very expensive to implement. We want to focus on ease of entry. What we’re doing is building this out-of-the-box, tailored solution that’s already baked into our existing platforms. So if you’re already using uContact or Unite, you don’t have to be a programmer or coder to bring AI in. We understand the need for a simple setup where all you need to do is enable it to work in the background of your interactions. And because it’s already embedded into our existing solution, the pricing model makes it affordable to add on without an additional provider. We believe our customers will easily be able to enable these unique features and provide them to all of their employees who could benefit from these unique solutions.

Down the pipeline, we’re looking to build new features like a coaching system where users can add their flavor to the AI side and ask questions and even virtual agents to handle basic capabilities. As we speak to customers, priorities could change, but this is only the beginning.

This will truly revolutionize the experiences for our customers and how they communicate and process data. I’m looking forward to hearing more from our customers and partners about what they’re looking for and what we can bring to the table for them. I also want to take a moment to appreciate the net2phone team, as all the work that’s gone into this tool and our success is a kudos to them.

I’m very excited about the future of net2phone and everything we’re doing. Ultimately, adding AI into the mix will allow our customers to maximize their productivity and help them fulfill their big-picture business goals. We are now starting to bring net2phone AI to select markets with the hope to expand to others in the future.