Rebecca Gibson |
For more than 10 years, Anywhere365 has been helping organisations to manage business communication and customer interactions via its Microsoft-centric and cloud-based contact centre solutions. Operating from offices throughout Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA, Anywhere365 works almost exclusively in conjunction with Microsoft’s unified communications (UC) platforms and it has more than 1,800 enterprise customers in 60 countries from many sectors, like automotive, advisory, pharmaceutical, smart industry, financial services and government. Its solutions have earned Anywhere365 an honourable mention in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Contact Centers report, as well as the Most Innovative Cloud-Based Contact Centre Platform 2021 Award.
Over the past decade, various companies have been trying to integrate their contact centre solutions into Microsoft UC platforms (and corresponding software development kits), however they have been plagued by both the frequently changing generations of the Microsoft platforms and the limited amount of integration possible. This has made it difficult to deliver the seamless contact centre operations that enterprises require.
Despite these challenges, Anywhere365 has developed its Dialogue Cloud, an advanced contact centre application that natively integrates with Microsoft Teams to allow businesses to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere and at any time. It uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the Microsoft Azure cloud to assess, route and translate customer enquiries from multiple channels to Microsoft Teams. In early 2021, the solution became the first contact centre application in the world to be certified by Microsoft as part of its Connected Contact Centers programme for Microsoft Teams.
According to Anywhere365 Group CEO Gijs Geurts, the company’s solution enables businesses to switch their focus from the contact centre to improving dialogue management. “The way forward for enterprise communication and customer engagement is not for your company to grow your contact centre,” he says. “Rather, it is about growing the intelligence in your business communications, so that you can reduce your unnecessary dialogues in every channel and every handler.”
Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud achieves this by enabling routine customer requests to be handled by AI voicebots and chatbots and transferring more complex dialogues to humans. The direct routing of dialogues to live agents is based on factors such as numbers, the skills and location of the agents, CRM data, and more.
“It is important that data from the CRM – including contextual information and a record of past conversations – move with the customer wherever their request is handled,” says Geurts. “We support a myriad of environments, allowing agents and supervisors to access data, monitor service levels and easily transfer interactions from a single screen. Not having to switch between different point solutions allows for faster call handling, which saves time and money, and allows companies to exceed customer expectations.”
Geurts explains that this is central to the dialogue management vision. “We believe that everyone in an organisation should be part of any dialogue,” he says. “This may sound surprising to some because that same belief was floated long ago, but back then there was no single UC platform and companies didn’t want to purchase contact centre licences for all their employees. Today we have Microsoft Teams, and that makes all the difference. Why would a business maintain two versions of presence – one for agents and one for enterprise users? That is why we leverage Microsoft Teams presence for all users.”
Using one presence system enables Anywhere365 to track every conversation a customer has with the contact centre, but also with any enterprise user on Microsoft Teams. “Business leaders love to have customer data available, but how do they keep track of a customer who is transferred outside of the contact centre to another employee elsewhere in the business?” asks Geurts. “Data is only valuable if it shows you the whole picture – your contact centre figures can be very successful, but your customers may be upset. The Anywhere365 dialogue management solution continues to track the conversation after the transfer and enables businesses to report on the time and experiences a customer has had with their entire organisation. It’s about the customer and their dialogue success, not about contact centre success.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.