Press Release

Talkdesk launches new generative AI features that make AI more responsible, accurate, and accessible in the contact center

Global enterprises benefit from the company’s enhanced generative AI-powered cloud platform that makes it easy to transform contact centers into fast, accurate, and personalized sources of information for seamless customer service

  • Talkdesk has layered generative AI (GenAI) across its entire contact center platform to improve outcomes throughout every stage of the customer journey. 
  • New Talkdesk GenAI features put responsible AI at the center of customer service by enabling enterprises to identify GenAI biases and hallucinations through observation, establish guardrails for outputs, and simulate the results. With this, Talkdesk becomes a partner in eliminating risk, and protecting brands and customers from poor AI experiences. 
  • Talkdesk has expanded upon its previous AI innovation to continue to change the way contact centers deploy, train, and access GenAI. With these features, agents and virtual agents are even more effective with real-time, precise answers to customer questions; contact center administrators can proactively introduce automations based on trending topics, and enterprises can train and fine-tune AI models much more efficiently and comprehensively without coding experience.
  • The latest GenAI innovation further demonstrates the company’s commitment to simplify AI and deliver innovation specialized to customer experience (CX).

SAN FRANCISCO — October 16, 2023 — Talkdesk®, Inc., a global AI-powered contact center leader for enterprises of all sizes, today announced significant product updates that deepen the integration of generative AI (GenAI) within its flagship Talkdesk CX Cloud platform and Industry Experience Clouds. Now, companies across industries can easily deploy, monitor, and fine-tune GenAI in the contact center with no coding experience, eliminate inaccurate and irresponsible AI use and subsequent brand risk, and create a powerful personalized experience for customers.

GenAI offers enterprises a variety of benefits across all business operations. In fact, a recent report from McKinsey found that applying GenAI to customer care functions could increase productivity by 30-45%, in addition to benefits created by ripple effects the technology may have on customer satisfaction and retention arising from an improved experience. However, GenAI within business is not without its challenges. According to a KPMG report, 92% of those surveyed said GenAI implementation introduces moderate to high-risk concerns, with liability (46%) and bias and accuracy (42%) within the top five threats.

Unlike most providers in the market, Talkdesk has ensured that GenAI features span its entire platform to allow enterprises to benefit from leveraging AI throughout every stage of the customer journey, while simultaneously ensuring accuracy and responsibility. As a result, enterprises can immediately and safely benefit from the value GenAI brings to improving customer service, including:

  • Making agents even more efficient and effective with real-time generative knowledge and automatic interaction summaries that can reduce after call work by up to 66% and  average handle time by up to 15% (product features: Automatic Summary and Generative Knowledge Retrieval)
  • Improving loyalty and satisfaction by automatically identifying topic and sentiment trends—including unknown unknowns—across every customer conversation with no setup required. This enables brands to transition from a reactive to proactive state, and make impactful changes faster. (product features: Automatic Topic Discovery)
  • Reducing the cost of delivering great customer experiences by making it possible to automate self-service of a wider range of more complex customer conversations in a few steps. GenAI eliminates the need for conversation design and dynamically generates dialog creating a human-like experience with laser-precise responses. (product features: Process-Based Virtual Agent and Generative Knowledge Retrieval)
  • Empowering enterprises to leverage AI safely and effectively with powerful no-code tools to identify biases and inaccuracies, create guardrails and simulate results, keeping humans in the loop to prevent any potential harm or discrimination (product features: Data Augmentation, GenAI Observability Dashboard, and GenAI Fine-tuning & Simulation)

Talkdesk has been a pioneer in contact center AI since 2018, and these latest product enhancements advance the company’s leadership in GenAI. Earlier this year, Talkdesk announced Automatic Summary, a feature to its Agent Assist product whereby GenAI significantly reduces after-call agent work to two seconds or less by automatically summarizing conversations between customers and agents. Enterprises have also benefited from Talkdesk Virtual Agent and AI Trainer, a no-code AI model training tool for better automation using human-in-the-loop technology.

Charanya Kannan, Talkdesk chief product and engineering officer, and Ken Cohen, senior vice president of sales, executive business development, and revenue growth for JK Moving Services, will jointly present in a “Supercharge Contact Center Efficiency with Generative AI” session at Gartner® IT Symposium/Xpo™ 2023 on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 3:15 p.m. EDT. Together, Kannan and Cohen will share insights about how the Talkdesk GenAI portfolio — designed to simplify AI and deliver results from day one — provides customers with the tools they need to adopt and manage AI responsibly.

Supporting Quotes

Ken Cohen, senior vice president of sales, executive business development, and revenue growth at JK Moving, North America’s largest independent moving company, commented: “Talkdesk has helped us use cutting-edge AI to transform our business. We’ve infused AI throughout the customer journey because, as a revenue-generating contact center, driving tangible results that improve the bottom line is non-negotiable. With the introduction of GenAI, we’ve taken our quality of service and operational efficiency a massive step further: our handle times have significantly decreased, and repeat business for our inside sales team has increased by 55%. What really stands out is Talkdesk’s commitment to delivering responsible AI. Built-in visibility and guardrails that I can control, without needing a team of data scientists, is a game-changer.”

Jennifer Lundberg, vice president of technology enablement at Humach, a single source customer support outsourcing company, said: “By digitally deflecting 80,000 calls (38%) to a digital virtual agent and 85,600 calls (37%) to a voice virtual agent, we’ve significantly improved operational efficiency. Now, with the integration of GenAI, our virtual agent is even more effective, delivering real-time, laser-precise answers. This has elevated the overall customer experience, making automated interactions exceptionally smooth and natural.” 

Tiago Paiva, chief executive officer and founder of Talkdesk, said: “About a year after its debut, GenAI significantly builds upon the benefits of artificial intelligence and has already proven to be a powerful tool for businesses. But as more enterprises deploy GenAI within business functions, it’s clear that more work needs to be done to ensure accuracy, responsibility, and accessibility of the technology. At Talkdesk, we’re taking a stand in the CCaaS industry to ensure that GenAI within the contact center does no harm to the business or its customers, provides the right level of personalized experiences across the customer journey, and gives more businesses access to its benefits.”

About Talkdesk

Talkdesk® is a global cloud contact center leader for enterprises of all sizes. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds help enterprises deliver modern customer service their way. Our trusted, flexible, and innovative contact center platform leverages AI and automation to drive exceptional outcomes for their customers and improve the bottom line. Serving enterprise customers in over 100 countries, we partner with our customers to deliver continuous innovation and breakthrough results. Our unwavering commitment to doing what we say we will do and our investment in the highest levels of security and reliability for our products make us second to none in the industry. Improve customer experiences, increase efficiency, and grow revenue with Talkdesk, a cloud contact center platform built for your industry. Learn more and take a self-guided demo at www.talkdesk.com.

Talkdesk is a registered trademark of Talkdesk, Inc. All product and company names are trademarks™ or registered® trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.

About Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ is the world’s most important gathering for CIOs and other IT executives. IT executives rely on these conferences to learn how to meet the moment and make a difference by providing the vision and results needed to lift their organizations to the next level. For more information, please visit https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/na/symposium-us.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Media Contact:

Talkdesk Public Relations

[email protected]