No Jitter Roll: Contact Center Updates, UCaaS NumbersNo Jitter Roll: Contact Center Updates, UCaaS Numbers
A look at the latest news coming from Google, Talkdesk, Yorktel, Frost & Sullivan, and Yamaha Unified Communications.
February 20, 2020
In this week’s No Jitter Roll, we share the latest on AI improvements for the contact center, enhancements to an outbound dialer service, a product discount for educational institutions, and an acquisition, and we look at the expansion of hosted IP telephony and UCaaS services in Asia-Pacific.
Google Cloud Contact Center AI Updates
This week, Google Cloud introduced a series of features for its Dialogflow platform for building intelligent conversational interfaces. The updates include:
Dialogflow Mega Agent for Cloud Contact Center AI — combines multiple Dialogflow agents into a single agent and expands intents from 2,000 to 20,000
Dialogflow Agent Validation — helps enterprises design virtual agents by highlighting quality issues like overlapping training phrases and wrong entity annotation
Versions and environments — let admins create multiple versions of agents for deployment to testing, development, staging, production, and other environments
Webhook Management API — helps admins create and manage webhooks
Dialogflow Mega Agent is available for beta testing; the rest of the features are generally available, Google said.
Talkdesk Adds Capabilities to Outbound Dialer Suite
Cloud contact center provider Talkdesk this week revealed three enhancements to its Outbound Dialer suite for contact centers. They are:
Predictive Dialer — manages dial pace and calculates “best time to reach” for customers or prospects, reducing the number of voicemails or busy signals that an agent might receive
Proactive Notifications — gives admins the ability to generate automatic phone or SMS notifications for appointment reminders, due date notices, order updates, shipping notifications, and the like
Enhanced Salesforce Dialer integration — updates include record filtering and list creation capabilities
This announcement is the second in Talkdesk’s “20-in-20” release program.
Yorktel Acquires Video Corporation of America
Collaboration and managed service provider Yorktel this week announced the acquisition of UC and audio-video integration provider Video Corporation of America (VCA). With the acquisition, Yorktel will now be able to offer VCA's "engineering, fabrication, field resources, digital signage, and help desk support" to its customer base, according to Ken Scaturro, president and COO of Yorktel.
UCaaS Services on the Rise in Asia-Pacific
This week, Frost & Sullivan released its latest report on Asia-Pacific's hosted IP telephony and UCaaS services market, which is expected to reach $3.5 billion by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2019 to 2025. Higher awareness of UCaaS benefits and the feature enhancements are expected to be the main driving force behind the growth, Frost & Sullivan said. Additionally, Frost & Sullivan expects he installed base for hosted IP telephony and UCaaS services will grow by 29% during the forecasted period, according to Frost & Sullivan.
Yamaha Unified Communications Goes to School
Yamaha Unified Communications announced U.S.- and Canada-based K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions can take advantage of its Dean's List Program, which offers a 10-20% discount on qualifying Yamaha product orders.
