Using AI, NTT and Microsoft are becoming CX superheroes

AI is fueling a revolution in customer experience (CX), and organizations have to move fast to seize the opportunities.

This is one of the findings in NTT’s 2023 Global Customer Experience Report, which takes stock of the state of CX around the world and explores how employee experience (EX), cloud, AI and automation are now contributing to great CX.

According to the report, organizations are recognizing the potential of AI in enhancing both CX and EX. This is to be expected amid the rapid growth of AI-driven applications around the world, which is also rapidly changing consumer attitudes. Now, customer satisfaction with AI-led CX interactions is on a par with customer satisfaction for human-led interactions, and customers’ resistance to AI-led CX is falling year on year.

Perhaps most tellingly, organizations cite AI as their top enabler of CX and EX in the next three years.

• ALSO READ → Great CX is accelerated by the EX factor (plus AI and the cloud)

Powering up with AI

At NTT, we have invested significantly in exploring the immense potential of AI in our managed Digital Collaboration and CX portfolio. In this environment, where our focus on CX and EX becomes more aligned in terms of both the underlying technologies and their strategic importance to organizations, I look after our EX products and services.

We have worked closely with Microsoft to make sure our cloud voice network and managed services platform integrate perfectly with Microsoft’s Teams, Dynamics 365, Digital Contact Center Platform and Azure Communication Services.

In this way, we’re providing the stepping stones that we need to enable client applications that involve bots, conversational AI and intelligent automation. 

Once our clients have modernized their communication platforms, it becomes faster and simpler to integrate generative-AI-enabled Microsoft technologies and use Microsoft Power Automate to streamline repetitive tasks and business processes.

You’re not alone: ask a managed service provider for help

Within this exciting and fast-developing AI ecosystem, managed services still play an important role.

At NTT, we’ve already created an AI-powered operations application that can alert us to – or even repair – faults in critical services such as cloud voice. This means we’re much more proactive in managing our clients’ communication and collaboration infrastructure and avoiding downtime by addressing issues before they have an impact.

We are also using natural-language processing to offer assistance to users and develop applications that use this technology. 

To make the most of such developments, we now encourage organizations to modernize their communication services with Microsoft technology.

This may seem daunting and is likely to involve some complexity for most organizations, but partnering with our managed services is a reliable way of making sure this strategy doesn’t take time away from your in-house IT team – time that can, for example, be better spent on evaluating other opportunities in generative and task-orientated AI. 

Say your organization has modernized EX and CX to incorporate the full Microsoft 365 suite, it will be easier down the line to implement innovations like Copilot – Microsoft’s new AI assistant for Microsoft 365 applications and services – securely and linked to optimally configured data sets. 

This can prove critical in remaining competitive and cutting down the time required to see the benefits of these new technologies.

• ALSO READ → Reinvent the modern workplace with Microsoft 365 Copilot

AI in action – with more to come

We’re already discovering myriad ways of applying our work in this area in a variety of industries.

In manufacturing, we have used integrated Teams and Azure Communication Services to create intelligent based on alerts received from IoT devices or proactive monitoring technology.

In financial services, we have in some cases used key technologies like Azure Communication Services to empower even on-premises contact centres with conversational AI solutions despite the severely regulated environment. It opens the door to new use cases in this key industry, and many banks may not yet even be aware of these possibilities. 

We have also helped emerging technology companies . For example, ICS.AI is a technology company that specializes in AI. We enabled their voice bot to handle routine queries about municipal services offered by councils in England. This service, powered by NTT’s Cloud Voice for CX, has reduced the pressure on the councils’ call center agents, who now answer calls only when the human element is needed.