Reliable, scalable, future-ready: AudioCodes extends the value of Teams for customer experiences with Azure Communication Services and Voca CIC

With the increasing demand for holistic, connected customer experiences, CX and unified communications are going hand-in-hand more than ever before. Today, anyone can become a citizen agent, directly assisting customers via the Teams phone system.

Cloud-based CX solutions make it easy for an enterprise to leverage service capabilities to employees beyond the traditional Contact Center. At AudioCodes, we believe that enterprise contact centers are moving toward integrated, cloud-based solutions not only to improve CX, but also to capitalize on the same investment for a better Employee Experience (EX). We’re seeing a strong market consensus around the integration of Microsoft Teams and Contact Center. Complementary to more AI and automation, agent counts continue to increase, as the new area of informal agents emerges.

With this in mind, we knew that enriching the AudioCodes Voca CIC (Conversational Interaction Center) with contact center capabilities tailored for organizations using Microsoft Teams Phone for customer experience would take our application to the next level and help us better serve our clients across 120 countries in the coming years.  We chose Azure Communication Services (ACS) to expedite development and, more importantly, to achieve the tightest possible integration with Microsoft Teams and fully leverage the Azure ecosystem.

We conducted a quick internal proof of concept to validate ACS's potential. Convinced by the results, our leadership team fully onboarded Voca CIC to Microsoft ACS in two phases, completing the transition in under six months. This approach laid the foundation for a long-term roadmap for us and our customers to maximize the capabilities offered by Microsoft ACS.

Enabling customers to scale up and grow with tightly-integrated zero downtime solutions

Our customer, Vanderlande, a global leader in logistics automation, needed fast routing and reliable call handling when seeking to upgrade their customer experience with a Microsoft Teams contact center. They wanted a reliable, cost-effective solution that could integrate with their existing Microsoft Teams environment and handle their hotlines.

Since implementing Voca CIC, they had their first holiday season in 5 years where they remained up and running with zero downtime across all 170 of their hotlines and were able to spin up new hotlines in less than 30 minutes. 

Levent Gunsuren, service owner of unified communications at Vanderlande shares, "Voca CIC has transformed our customer service at Vanderlande. Integrating our contact center with Microsoft Teams has not only optimized call flows and reduced agent onboarding time but has also utilized conversational AI for valuable customer insights."

We also worked with the University of Central Florida (UCF). Voca CIC offered UCF the ACS integration for Microsoft Teams they wanted as well as forward-looking AI capabilities, allowing them to quickly scale to the university’s size and future growth plans. Voca CIC simplified the process with just a few clicks. UCF can now quickly add new AI-empowered tenants for university departments like the athletic ticketing office, medical center, and police department, among 40 other contact center desks residing on campus.

“I’m finding that Voca is actually more accepted than other products in the past because of how easy it is to use. On top of that, the reliability, it has been such a staple [contact center] that we haven’t had any downtime," shares Keith Honaker, Lead UC and Head Architect of Contact Centers at UCF.

How we fast-tracked development of modern, intelligent capabilities with the Azure Communication Services ecosystem

Through the AudioCodes and Microsoft ACS partnership, we fast-tracked the development of critical CX capabilities, positioning Voca CIC as a market leader in the Microsoft Teams CCaaS space. By integrating Job Router, we introduced a modern, future-proof intelligent routing capability that efficiently matches voice and digital interactions with the best-suited live agent. With the Microsoft ACS Calling SDK, Voca CIC achieved direct integration with the native Microsoft Teams voice and media layer (also known as ‘Microsoft Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud’ or ‘Microsoft IC3’) – giving Voca CIC superior reliability, stability and uptime compared to other Teams-CCaaS solutions using different integration models. The ACS-based integration means that Voca CIC can provide its enterprise customers with true 99.999%, just like Teams Phone. The strategic choice to use Job Router and the Calling SDK from Microsoft ACS is a testament to the acceleration and innovation made possible through the partnership between AudioCodes and Microsoft ACS. 

Head of Business Line Gidi Adlersberg, Voca Conversational Interaction Center at AudioCodes shares, “AudioCodes is on a mission to lead with innovative solutions that enable flexible, scalable, AI-powered cloud communications for Microsoft Teams. With the Azure Communication Services technology stack, we have been able to bring to market the tightest integration possible between a CCaaS solution to Microsoft Teams. The ACS capabilities bring Teams Phone seamlessly to Voca CIC agents over Azure-native SDKs, coupled with intelligent routing services that provide us with real-time, Azure-native event data integrated into ourVoca Conversational Interaction Center solution. These strategic capabilities, part of the wider Azure Communication Services ecosystem, allow us to continuously develop a modern, robust solution with Azure and continue to redefine the future of CX in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem."

Investing in advanced AI innovation to deliver best-in-class Teams customer experiences

Since launching in April 2022, AI technologies have been central to Voca CIC. Powered by Azure’s conversational AI stack—Speech-to-Text, Generative AI, Natural Language Understanding, Text-to-Speech, and other cognitive services—Voca CIC powers millions of monthly calls worldwide with this technology. These built-in AI services also power Voca CIC’s Conversational IVR and IVA call flow automation. 

Azure’s investment in AI services has enabled us to deliver the most advanced conversational AI experiences to the company’s enterprise customers, including 65 Fortune 100 companies. By combining these tools with our expertise in linguistics and speech, we provide market-leading conversational AI to our customers. Generative AI technologies from Azure OpenAI take this innovation even further. As we integrate these capabilities into Voca CIC, we’re driving new levels of efficiency and creativity in the Microsoft Teams CX space, all for the benefit of our customers.

"Azure Communication Services provides us with immediate access to the latest and most advanced Azure technologies in calling, CX, and AI. Their team collaborates with us weekly, treating us as true design partners. This partnership empowers us to win customers and helps enterprises deliver best-in-class Microsoft Teams customer experiences. We are excited to continue growing the relationship and work with ACS, as we strive to unfold new areas in the Teams CX ecosystem." – Elad Sananes, Product Lead, Voca Conversational Interaction Center, AudioCodes