Elly Yates-Roberts |
Working from home or other remote locations has become the new normal for many people over the past 18 months as organisations worldwide continue to transform their businesses to ensure they can remain operational, while keeping employees and customers safe during the pandemic. For many businesses, the top priority is to ensure that their employees can still work productively, communicate and collaborate effectively with colleagues, and deliver high-quality services and experiences to customers.
To achieve this, organisations have migrated from traditional legacy IT infrastructures and office-based phone systems to cloud-based enterprise communication and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams. This has enabled them to seamlessly connect everyone in the business to a single platform, allowing colleagues to easily interact with one another and with external partners and clients.
However, many enterprises are still struggling to provide seamless and streamlined customer services. IT help desks are busier than ever before and contact centre agents are spending hours dealing with a rising number of time-consuming customer questions, taking them away from higher value tasks. This is compounded by the fact that customers are hard to satisfy, demanding instant answers and personalised services that feel as though they have been tailored to meet their specific needs and preferences. Consequently, now is the time for organisations to rethink the way they manage customer dialogues, moving these conversations beyond the traditional contact centre and instead routing them to whoever in the organisation is best-equipped to deal with them – whether they are in the customer services, sales, IT or executive teams.
Reports suggest that 85 per cent of enterprises worldwide have already invested in Microsoft Teams, so the optimal route for many would be to extend the platform with new enterprise voice capabilities and other functionalities. To do this, they can implement a cloud contact centre application that natively integrates with Microsoft Teams and their other back-office IT systems, such as their customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
Designed to natively integrate with Microsoft Teams and empower businesses to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere and at any time, Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud was the first solution of its kind to be certified as part of Microsoft’s Connected Contact Centers programme for Microsoft Teams in early 2021. The solution uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and Microsoft Azure to automatically assess and route customer enquiries from multiple channels to Microsoft Teams. Routine customer requests – such as questions about opening hours – are handled by AI voice bots and chatbots, which can directly transfer more complex queries to live customer service agents or knowledge workers if necessary. Call recipients are chosen based on factors such as data from the customer relationship management system, the skills and availability of employees, and more.
Employees can interact with customers from any device, channel, location or time zone. They also receive contextual information about the caller so they can personalise the service and quickly resolve the query. In addition, users benefit from multiple features and functionalities, such as call recording, real-time translation, customer interaction timelines, wallboards, and more. They can access all these functionalities, and the customer data, via a single screen, rather than switching between different point solutions, saving time and money. This boosts employee productivity and efficiency, while ensuring that businesses can deliver personalised services that exceed customer expectations, regardless of where their employees are based.
In addition, Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud tracks customer interactions across all platforms, providing business leaders with a full history of each customer, as well as real-time reports so they can monitor service levels and gauge customer satisfaction. The software also has ISO27001 certification, indicating that it is secure and complies with industry regulations.
Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud is much more than a support solution for contact centres; it’s an enterprise dialogue management solution that streamlines and expedites interactions, captures critical customer data, and provides businesses with the data they need to continuously improve customer service. It’s an ideal solution for enterprises that are investing in Microsoft technology for their digital transformation and make a paradigm shift in the way they manage business communications.
Gijs Geurts is CEO of Anywhere365
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.