The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

48 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om Optimising dialogue management Gijs Geurts explains how Anywhere365’s advanced contact centre application integrates with Microsoft Teams to improve how organisations manage enterprise communications and customer interactions BY R E B E CCA G I B SON F or more than 10 years, Anywhere365 has been helping organisations to manage busi- ness communication and customer interac- tions 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 communi- cations (UC) platforms and it hasmore than 1,800 enterprise customers in 60 countries from many sectors, like automotive, advisory, pharmaceuti- cal, smart industry, financial services and gov- ernment. 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 cor- responding 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 con- tact centre application that natively integrates withMicrosoft Teams to allow businesses to inter- act with customers across any channel, from any- where 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 certi- fied 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 busi- nesses 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 busi- ness 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 I NT E R V I EW