Rebecca Gibson |
For a business to be successful, it must be able to deliver high-quality services and seamless, enjoyable experiences to all customers at all times. Recognising that enterprises can quickly lose customers if they have an unsatisfactory experience, Netherlands-based firm AFAS Software decided to improve how it communicates with customers using its financial, payroll and human resources software.
After moving its unified communications centre to Microsoft Teams, the firm implemented the Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud to enable it to interact with customers across any channels, from anywhere at any time. It also deployed Anywhere365 Dialogue Studio, a low-code platform that allows AFAS to quickly design, programme and deploy dialogue flows for artificial intelligence-enabled voice bots. The solution facilitates flexible data-driven routing of incoming dialogue flows by surfacing relevant data from the customer relationship management platform.
“We chose Anywhere365 because we wanted to have a more customer-oriented telephone line,” says Bas Rozendal, customer support manager at AFAS. “The main challenge was that we wanted the flexibility to have full control and we required a lot of options within the product. Anywhere365 solutions like Dialogue Studio helped us to achieve these possibilities.”
Anywhere365 is also an open platform, which allows AFAS to work with various application programming interfaces and its own software.
“The strength of Dialogue Studio is that we can be very flexible in the setup of our processes,” explains Jeroen de Bee, who is responsible for application and process management at AFAS. “This means that we can really meet the needs of our organisation and also those of our customers, giving us a future-proof solution.”
Dialogue Studio has empowered AFAS’s agents to work more efficiently and productively, while expediting the query resolution process and improving the customer experience. A key benefit is that AFAS can quickly amend the dialogue flow.
“In the past it took us a lot of time to make a change but now we can instantly implement them with a click of a button,” says Rozendal. “As a result, we are very flexible and agile.”
AFAS and Anywhere365 are continuing to collaborate to develop new functionalities – such as queued callback and text-to-speech – that can be quickly rolled out to improve both the customer and employee experience.
“As you see with the AFAS deployment, you can make the customer experience very specific and personal, based on different sources of data,” says Erik van Arkel, head of sales at Anywhere365. “This results in both a great customer and agent experience.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.