44 INTERVIEW No more hold music Damian Black of Anywhere365 explains how conversational AI technology and large language models are facilitating new capabilities that will redefine the contact centre experience BY REBECCA GIBSON Famed as the ‘Little Italy’ of San Francisco, USA, North Beach is a lively destination offering multiple gastronomic, historic and cultural attractions for residents and visitors to explore – if they can find a space to park their car. “Parking at North Beach is a nightmare,” says Damian Black, chief product and technology officer at Anywhere365. “There aren’t enough parking spaces, so everyone drives around in circles and you get stuck in traffic for what feels like hours. It’s a lovely place, but visiting by car is always a stressful experience.” According to Black, the experience of parking in North Beach is analogous to contacting a call centre to ask a query or resolve an issue. “When you call a contact centre, you have to navigate a complex automated menu to be connected with the right department, then you sit on hold for a long time before someone finally answers your call,” he says. “Often, this person is unable to help you, so they transfer you to another department and you’re forced to go through the whole cycle again, continually repeating yourself until you finally reach someone with the expertise to resolve your issue. It can take hours – or sometimes days – to resolve your query and leaves you frustrated, fed up and contemplating taking your custom elsewhere in future.” To reduce call waiting times and increase first contact resolution rates, Black recommends that organisations adopt contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions, such as Anywhere365’s Dialogue Cloud. The platform natively integrates with Microsoft Teams and other back-office IT systems to enable businesses to interact with customers across any channel via any device, from anywhere at any time. It also leverages conversational artificial intelligence technology and large language models (LLMs) to power virtual assistants that can automatically handle basic queries and route callers to humans if necessary. “LLMs and AI are driving key breakthroughs in business-to-consumer (B2C) communications,” says Black. “The comprehension capabilities of virtual assistants powered by these technologies are extraordinary – they can interpret nuanced speech in multiple languages and accents. Customers describe the problem and the LLM will understand it, summarise it and provide a fast and accurate answer using relevant information from the organisation’s knowledge database. “Alternatively, if the virtual assistant identifies a complex issue that would benefit from human interaction, it will automatically route the caller to the most qualified person, providing them with a concise and contextualised overview of the interaction so they can help instantly.” In addition, AI and LLMs are enabling Anywhere365 to facilitate smarter call routing. “Traditionally, each agent is assigned specific tags to denote their skills and contact centre solutions use this information to match them “Virtual assistants will probably be more knowledgeable and quicker at resolving problems than humans”
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