44 INTERVIEW Anyone can be an agent with AI Anywhere365’s Will Blench explains how AI technology is empowering businesses with the data and capabilities they need to provide fast, accurate and personalised responses to every customer BY REBECCA GIBSON One of the biggest challenges for any contact centre agent is being able to quickly and confidently provide the most helpful answer to the customer the first time they ask the question. Traditionally, they have struggled to do this because they were unable to access relevant contextual information and historical customer data while speaking with customers. Consequently, customers frequently had to wait in long telephone queues or constantly repeat the same information to multiple agents until their issue was resolved. However, this is all changing with the introduction of artificial intelligence technology, says Will Blench, CEO of Anywhere365. “AI is empowering organisations to develop new services and capabilities that are transforming how they interact with customers,” he explains. “Many businesses are using the technology to develop voice or chat bots that can answer basic or frequently asked questions, allowing customers to serve themselves if they wish to. This has been particularly beneficial following the widespread introduction of hybrid and remote working models, and the mass migration to cloud-based communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, over the past few years. It has enabled companies to continue easily serving vast volumes of customers, no matter where their contact centre agents are based.” However, while self-service chatbots are beneficial for certain use cases, they are less effective in complex service desk environments. “The chatbots don’t always have access to the right data to understand the full context of the conversation, so people don’t always find them useful,” says Blench. “Although I’m optimistic that we’ll see a significant shift in our ability to solve this data problem in the next couple of years and eventually develop fully intuitive automated chatbots, for now, they still need a mechanism to reroute customers to humans who can help out.” Instead, Blench believes the biggest opportunity for using AI in customer service is to develop applications that help agents respond to enquiries more quickly and accurately. “AI-powered agent assist technology is making the biggest difference in terms of employee productivity, service quality and cost savings,” says Blench. “Anywhere365 is unique in that we use data to help the agents. For instance, we have capitalised on Microsoft Azure OpenAI services to facilitate opportunities in real-time audio transcription, generate conversation summaries, and much more.” In 2023, Anywhere365 integrated Deepdesk’s AI agent assist technology into its Dialogue Cloud platform and fully acquired the company in 2024. Deepdesk’s solution uses natural language processing algorithms and machine learning technology to analyse customer “ Chatbots don’t always have access to the right data to understand the full context of the conversation, so people don’t always find them useful”
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