CafeX Live Assist for Microsoft Dynamics 365’s new Cosmos release facilitates chatbot-to-agent escalation, and provides an SDK for mobile customer service.
At Microsoft Inspire in Washington, D.C., CafeX Communications has announced Cosmos, the new version of its omnichannel customer service solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365, CafeX Live Assist for Microsoft Dynamics 365, that it first rolled out back in March.
CafeX Live Assist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 has done well in the three months plus since it was released. The company’s relationship began after it won ‘product of the year’ at Enterprise Connect in 2014, signed OEM partnerships with companies like Cisco and Avaya, and leveraged those OEM relationships to win some big deals. Microsoft approached them, looking to upgrade the chat capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365. The resulting tight integration was tested and certified by Microsoft as the preferred omnichannel solution for Dynamics 365. Since then they have had a significant number of customer wins, and attracted almost 100 members to its Live Assist for Dynamics 365 partner program.
“The Inspire show has been going very well for us,” said Sajeel Hussain, CMO at CafeX. “The response has been amazing, especially from a partner perspective. They have been flocking to us. They have been getting the same message from Microsoft, that this is a jointly sanctioned omnichannel solution for Dynamics 365.
Cosmos, the name given to this particular release, adds several enhancements. One is what CafeX is calling a ‘bring your own chatbot approach’ that allows a customer to seamlessly escalate from a bot conversation to an appropriate human agent, without having to change channels.
“We provide the last mile of the customer journey with this,” Hussain said. “This is the only solution that makes this escalation from bot to live agent possible in Dynamics. We do this by providing an API for the bot developers to make a simple handover to the live agent.”
Another notable enhancement is improving mobile customer support with new SDKs.
“These SDKs will allow enterprises to embed several new capabilities into Android and iOS applications,” Hussain said. This includes enabling agents to create customizable content engagement campaigns, to chat live with mobile app users, and to view and remotely interact with visitors’ apps through co-navigation, annotation, file push and other types of visual assistance.
Several usability improvements to enhance agent efficiency are also part of Cosmos. Agents now have an expanded view of customer context, can receive audible and visual notifications, and can use shortcut keys to perform actions. They can now also access canned messages grouped by category, easily associate contact records with active chats and handle multiple chats more effectively, among other productivity enhancement features.
Hussain also offered a peak in what’s coming in the near future.
“Customers and partners have said that they want more on the same platform, and want voice and video capability added to it,” he said. The platform has been designed to support these, and they will be forthcoming.
“They also want it to be more business outcome-driven for Dynamics, with the ability to drive specific business outcomes,” Hussain added. “We will be adding more tools for this as part of the next release.”
