Famed as the ‘Little Italy’ of San Francisco, USA, North Beach is a lively destination offering multiple gastronomic, historic and cultural attractions for residents and visitors to explore – if they can find a space to park their car.
“Parking at North Beach is a nightmare,” says Damian Black, chief product and technology officer at Anywhere365. “There aren’t enough parking spaces, so everyone drives around in circles and you get stuck in traffic for what feels like hours. It’s a lovely place, but visiting by car is always a stressful experience.”
According to Black, the experience of parking in North Beach is analogous to contacting a call centre to ask a query or resolve an issue. “When you call a contact centre, you have to navigate a complex automated menu to be connected with the right department, then you sit on hold for a long time before someone finally answers your call,” he says. “Often, this person is unable to help you, so they transfer you to another department and you’re forced to go through the whole cycle again, continually repeating yourself until you finally reach someone with the expertise to resolve your issue. It can take hours – or sometimes days – to resolve your query and leaves you frustrated, fed up and contemplating taking your custom elsewhere in future.”
To reduce call waiting times and increase first contact resolution rates, Black recommends that organisations adopt contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions, such as Anywhere365’s Dialogue Cloud. The platform natively integrates with Microsoft Teams and other back-office IT systems to enable businesses to interact with customers across any channel via any device, from anywhere at any time. It also leverages conversational artificial intelligence technology and large language models (LLMs) to power virtual assistants that can automatically handle basic queries and route callers to humans if necessary.
“LLMs and AI are driving key breakthroughs in business-to-consumer (B2C) communications,” says Black. “The comprehension capabilities of virtual assistants powered by these technologies are extraordinary – they can interpret nuanced speech in multiple languages and accents. Customers describe the problem and the LLM will understand it, summarise it and provide a fast and accurate answer using relevant information from the organisation’s knowledge database.
“Alternatively, if the virtual assistant identifies a complex issue that would benefit from human interaction, it will automatically route the caller to the most qualified person, providing them with a concise and contextualised overview of the interaction so they can help instantly.”
In addition, AI and LLMs are enabling Anywhere365 to facilitate smarter call routing.
“Traditionally, each agent is assigned specific tags to denote their skills and contact centre solutions use this information to match them with callers but it’s not always accurate,” says Black. “Now, Anywhere365 is using LLMs and AI to power semantics-based routing, which enables virtual assistants to understand the full meaning of a customer’s statements and identify the right agent based on this information. This makes the call routing process far more precise, minimising the likelihood of callers being transferred multiple times and eliminating wasted time for both the agent and the customer.”
Anywhere365 uses AI technology to provide agents with detailed call summaries, suggested responses and more to improve customer interactions
Anywhere365, which has acquired Deepdesk and integrated its AI agent assist technology into the Dialogue Cloud platform alongside Microsoft Azure OpenAI services, is also using LLMs and conversational AI to develop applications that help human agents respond to enquiries more quickly and accurately. It uses these technologies to generate conversation summaries, transcribe audio in real time, autocomplete sentences and suggest next-best actions or relevant cross-selling or upselling opportunities.
“Giving agents access to this detailed information empowers them to quickly understand the issue and work productively and efficiently to provide accurate and personalised responses,” says Black. “This cuts resolution times and frees agents up to focus on more complex issues. Our AI technology also performs real-time sentiment analysis on conversations, helping agents to understand how their behaviour is impacting the customer experience and how they can improve the interaction. Together, these capabilities significantly enhance service quality.”
Meanwhile, supervisors can use analytics to track the performance of both individual agents and the overall call centre to detect and fix issues in real time before they affect customers.
“Supervisors can monitor call queues and waiting times to ensure they aren’t too long or intervene in conversations if an agent isn’t answering questions quickly, accurately or in compliance with company policy,” says Black. “This allows them to redistribute resources and prevent agents from mishandling situations. Organisations can also analyse how their team interacts with the different features of our platform to understand how to optimise their use. We’re continually updating these capabilities with the aim of establishing a virtuous cycle where we’re able to use AI-driven analytics to improve the usability of Dialogue Cloud and enhance both the agent and customer experience.”
To further optimise its CCaaS offering, Anywhere365 has also integrated Azure Communication Services (ACS), Microsoft’s B2C communication platform, into Dialogue Cloud.
“The APIs and software development kits in ACS open up multiple opportunities for us to improve Dialogue Cloud and create new chat, voice, video, text messaging, email and other capabilities,” says Black. “These features will enable us to deliver seamless omnichannel communications, making it easier to transfer people between different channels, depending on what is most convenient and appropriate at the time. For example, the customer might start the interaction with a voice call but receive a text message with a link to an online portal where they can resolve their issue.”
Anywhere365 plans to integrate ACS across the remainder of its product portfolio and will also continue to explore how it can use AI and LLMs to further optimise the contact centre experience for both customers and agents, according to Black.
“Our unified platform already provides the tools organisations need to help their call centre teams resolve customer queries more productively, efficiently and cost effectively, but conversational AI and LLMs are empowering us to fully reshape the way they operate,” he says.
Black predicts that once these technologies are fully mature and embedded in CCaaS solutions, they will make virtual assistants a more attractive option than human agents for many customers.
“Today, customers are still sceptical of AI-powered chatbots because they’re not yet capable of providing solutions to complex issues, but conversational AI and LLMs are unlocking new capabilities that will fundamentally change how we interact with them,” he says. “At some point, virtual assistants will probably be more knowledgeable and quicker at resolving problems than humans. They’ll also be more specialised and have human-like characteristics, so conversations will be more natural and interactive – for instance, customers may be able to interrupt them as they do now when speaking to a person. Fully autonomous bots will likely become a reality in future too.
“AI and LLMs have the power to redefine B2C communications and Anywhere365 is at the forefront of this transformation, leading the way in creating the call centre of the future.”
Discover more insights like this in the Winter 2024 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox!