Verizon Business has unveiled a new suite of digital engagement capabilities for the Verizon Virtual Contact Center (VCC).

The latest VCC digital solutions focus on creating smart, connected, self-service and human-assisted interactions.

Verizon’s Debika Bhattacharya

Debika Bhattacharya is chief product officer at Verizon Business.

“In the past few years, the contact center has undergone a digital transformation, which is prompting the end-to-end customer journey to evolve in kind. With more customers turning to digital channels outside of the contact center to kickstart their issue resolution, companies need a holistic strategy for managing customer entry points,” Bhattacharya said. “The Verizon Virtual Contact Center anticipates and addresses those digital-first interactions, allowing organizations to deliver improved, personalized customer experiences.”

Addressing a Full Range of Needs, Digital Solutions

The contact center experience is at times reactionary and transactional, Verizon officials said. Customers today expect companies to address their full range of “needs” effortlessly across any channel. It should be a seamless transition to human agents when necessary. Many organizations, however, don’t have the necessary insight to coordinate all their digital entry points and customer experience interactions. If they did, they might get the most from search engines, mobile/desktop apps, websites and social media.

To reduce friction for customers, VCC provides new ways to digitally transform the customer experience (CX). VCC Guide provides self-service, contextual guidance for web and mobile experiences. In addition, VCC Expert is a smart knowledge management and content optimization tool that optimizes content to shape the customer journey. VCC Enlighten XO builds smarter applications using auto-generated insights through artificial intelligence (AI) that’s based on actual CX conversation data. Finally, VCC SmartAssist powered by Amelia is a smart conversational AI that can resolve customer and employee issues in a more natural way.

In its 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report, NICE found that 81% of customers will first try to solve their problems on their own using web search or self-service. Sold separately or as a part of VCC’s complete solution, these latest digital capabilities are vendor-agnostic. They can be bolted on top of any existing contact center solution to help address individual entry points. Customers will be empowered with the most relevant content for self-service success. Faster, more accurate agent-assisted answers will allow organizations to be better equipped to address their customers’ needs with fewer transfers and callbacks, the company said.