Let's get real: Microsoft Copilot for customer service

While Generative AI is one of the hottest business topics in the world for 2024, many decision-makers are still trying to get their heads around the ‘how does this work in the real world – for our business?’ question.

Yet, AI in business is far from new – it’s been an embedded part of the workforce for some time.

To quote Forbes, “AI and machine learning have been making waves for more than a decade, and are thoroughly integrated into many of the products and services we buy from major companies.” The difference now, though, says Forbes, is that “generative AI puts the power to create and intelligently automate the customer experience - as well as internal operations - in the hands of nearly every organization.”

So, now that it’s in your hands, let’s talk about the real-world difference it’ll make to you, your teams, and your customers. Starting with customer service.

Meet your newest contact centre agent

When you bring Copilot for Service onboard, you also get Copilot for Microsoft 365 (so you start with an automatic bonus!). Copilot’s job is to enhance service experiences and boost agent productivity in your existing contact centre through generative AI.

But to understand Copilot’s impact,  you also need to understand what you couldn’t do before.

A bit of a know-it-all

Contact centres have practically always had knowledge bases to provide agents with answers to common caller questions. However, these articles were always created by a staff member and were often static due to the time required to write and update them.

Customer and agent conversations are recorded as a matter of best practice. So, a typical call may feature a customer asking for help with a product, and the agent will run through various scenarios to fix the issue. This conversation can be documented as a knowledge base article or as individual Q&As to run through.

Having a Copilot on board will change all that.

Whereas before, your agent would need to run the customer through a series of questions and visit links to narrow down and present a list of potential answers, now, Copilot will listen in on the conversation, use reason to work out what the customer wants and execute a natural language query across any data source your agent has open in their knowledge base tab (or even from external data accessed via out-of-the-box integrations for trusted websites). Your agent doesn’t need to do a thing – just continue to talk to the customer while their Copilot does all the hard work and presents the correct, narrowed-down answer back in a single, clearly articulated paragraph – ready to read out or email to the customer.

So, resolving issues becomes a much faster and more accurate process and the KPIs your contact centre lives and dies by, are exceeded.

The voice of reason

Sentiment analysis is a powerful scoring tool beloved by call centre managers and customer experience leaders. It allows them to learn more about their customers and what matters to them. If the caller’s voice inflection and language convey that they are upset or aggressive, the call can be escalated to include a more experienced or knowledgeable agent.

Which is great. But Copilot is even better.

It can serve up real-time suggestions to the agent on how to change the tone of the conversation to a more positive one and aim for resolution without resorting to escalation. Copilot can also chime in with real-time feedback on where a caller’s service request is up to – pre-empting them even needing to ask.

But wait, there's more

Overhead View Of A Businesswoman Doing Multitasking Work On Electronic Devices.
Copilot has many talents. These include the ability to summarise a customer/agent transcript and save it against the contact – along with a list of actions. So, when the customer calls back, the next agent can quickly continue the conversation without dropping the service ball. Copilot also recognises a repeat caller and immediately presents their details and comms summary from the CRM on the agent’s screen.

If that same customer decides to follow up using email, your agent doesn’t even need to swap apps to reply or record the interaction in the contact centre CRM. Copilot will assess the incoming email and check the service status of the customer’s device (for example). And as your Copilot customer service license includes Copilot for Microsoft 365 apps and CRM services, it will automatically draft a contextually and grammatically correct reply ready for your agent to review and send. Not only does the customer get a much faster response, but your agent is empowered to be more productive and efficient. Copilot will also save the email against the customer’s record. Just like that.  

Best of all, Copilot will work with almost any digital contact centre – including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics 365, and Zendesk, so that’s another real-world problem solved.