Bringing generative AI to on-premises contact centers: Talkdesk Ascend Connect

The landscape of customer experience is undergoing a profound transformation with the introduction of generative AI. It is reshaping how brands engage with their customers and enhancing every facet of the customer journey—from crafting hyper-personalized experiences to generating dynamic content, as well as fostering engagement at an unprecedented scale. Generative AI is revolutionizing how businesses communicate, resonate, and ultimately thrive in today’s highly competitive marketplace.

However, a significant portion of the contact center market still relies on on-premises platforms that are difficult to integrate with generative AI. We recognize that every company’s journey to the cloud is different and that many contact centers have compelling reasons to transition their contact center at a slower pace. Given the game-changing nature of generative AI, however, these organizations may quickly find themselves at a significant disadvantage to their competitors who are already operating in the cloud and integrating this new technology into their processes. Keeping true to our DNA of innovation, we’re once again revolutionizing the customer support industry by bringing the power of generative AI to on-premises contact centers.

Talkdesk Ascend Connect™, our suite of generative AI-powered customer experience applications seamlessly integrates with legacy contact centers. It offers a flexible adoption model to help organizations with on-premises infrastructure take advantage of our cutting-edge generative AI capabilities without having to invest in a brand new contact center. This means they can get all the benefits of Talkdesk AI—automating interactions, empowering agents, and streamlining operations—while optimizing their existing technology investments.

Talkdesk Ascend Connect leverages no-code development tools to empower in-house teams to quickly deploy, customize, and maintain generative AI models through a drag-and-drop interface with no need for programming knowledge or expensive data scientists.

Empowering on-premises contact centers with generative AI.

Talkdesk Ascend Connect represents a groundbreaking innovation in the CX industry by enabling legacy, on-premises contact centers to adopt generative AI and pave the way for memorable customer experiences. Key capabilities include the following:

AI for self-service.

In addition to round-the-clock, personalized support expected by customers, businesses are facing an increase in the number of calls that strain the already stretched resources of the contact center.

Talkdesk Autopilot is a virtual agent that uses generative AI to autonomously resolve routine and complex queries, providing smoother customer self-service 24/7. It handles common customer queries and seamlessly transfers customers to a live agent if they require human expertise. Take Humach as an example—they significantly improved operational efficiency by digitally deflecting 85,600 calls (37%) to Talkdesk Autopilot.

Additionally, it integrates with other key platforms in the company, such as CRM and CORE, to enhance efficiency and streamline operations across the business organization.

Real-time agent guidance.

Agents drive great customer experiences, but this may be a difficult task if they aren’t focused on the customer. Spending too much time going through lengthy articles to find an answer or performing repetitive tasks can lower performance and reduce the quality of service they provide.

Talkdesk Copilot provides real-time guidance to customer support teams. It empowers agents with generative AI that listens and learns to deliver real-time automated assistance, contextual recommendations, and next-best actions that optimize performance, deliver superior customer service, and reduce costs. Generative AI extends to after call work by automatically summarizing interaction key points and selecting call disposition codes, improving accuracy, reducing handle time, and helping agents get results faster. Most importantly, it frees agents to focus on providing excellent customer service instead of mechanical tasks.

See how our customer CAI achieved eight minutes of agent time savings with automated call summaries using Talkdesk Copilot. Saving this time on each call represents substantial operational gains and improves agent engagement.

Customer intelligence.

The contact center is a goldmine of actionable data, yet only a very small part of that data is mined and analyzed for insights. Talkdesk Interaction Analytics uses generative AI to uncover insights into contact center interaction data and understand customer behavior, friction points, and opportunities to improve the customer experience. Talkdesk Interaction Analytics enabled BCLC with tools for speech analytics and sentiment analysis to put numbers behind every customer interaction and find new ways of fine-tuning their CX approach. A few stats for KPIs they were able to improve:

• Lowered average handle time to 210.7 seconds.
• Decreased average hold time to 24.7 seconds.
• Reduced abandonment rate to 12%.

AI training.

Training, maintaining, and customizing AI models is time consuming and requires expensive data scientists. Talkdesk AI Trainer has a simple, no-code interface that empowers non-technical customer service staff to easily update models and ensure they’re always aligned with evolving business needs. A set of pre-built dashboards easily spot biases and hallucinations, establishing protective guardrails to monitor AI behavior and ensure ethical AI usage.

On this topic of our commitment to responsible AI and the impact of AI Trainer, our customer JK Moving Services states that “Built-in visibility and guardrails that I can control, without needing a team of data scientists, is a game-changer that maximizes our opportunities with AI, turning our telephony cost center into a profit center.

Talkdesk Ascend Connect gives on-premises contact centers the ability to leverage generative AI to power their customer service. Its no-code intuitive interface allows non-technical roles to quickly deploy, update, and customize generative AI models using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Talkdesk Ascend Connect empowers any business running legacy software to provide superior customer service, empower agents, and drive growth.