Adoption of cloud has stimulated call centre as a service (CCaaS) innovation to the extent that open CCaaS now provides a platform for applying generative AI. This enables routine, repetitive tasks to be automated and agents freed up to handle complex, urgent queries.
“Seven or eight years ago saw the move to cloud and the acceleration of public cloud and that’s where CCaaS development has really gained pace,” confirms Andy Roberts, the Chief Executive Officer of Sabio, pointing out that adoption isn’t uniform.
“Organisations are moving to the cloud at different speeds. Digital native organisations are moving very quickly and larger-scale enterprises are moving a little bit slower.”
However, cloud adoption only provides a foundation upon which gen AI can be applied. “As far as open CCaaS is concerned, it’s not just about moving to the cloud, it’s about bringing other elements of the customer experience to life using all of the AI capabilities,” adds Roberts. “Sabio has had relationships with automation starting with IVR and moving through natural language speech recognition and now conversational AI. With that comes the ability to make a difference for the end customer and that’s about providing the appropriate service at the right time.”
Where, when and why to automate
Getting that timing right, alongside the correct level of response demands access to data and fuelling AI-enabled responses in ways that appeal to customers. “Looking at how organisations ensure they provide the right experience at the right time for the right type of request is at the heart of what we’re trying to do,” he explains. “We’re thinking about the right transactions to automate and those where a live agent is needed.”
Roberts gives the example of a large European mobile provider that has an on-premise call centre architecture but has turned to cloud for AI and automation. The provider has been able to automate 59% of its call centre traffic, with 36 billion calls per year automated – with obvious operational cost savings and efficiency gains. A significant additional benefit has been that this level of automation has also resulted in a 27 point increase in net promoter score (NPS).
“Being able to extract the value of moving to cloud for the enterprise customers we work with means having to think of the end customer with user-centred design engineers sitting on the customer side of the fence,” confirms Roberts.
“We also use speech scientists and prompt engineers to tune the bots and automate the agents.”
Use cases enabled by gen AI, such as automated summarisation of calls, are one example but Roberts sees some business process being revolutionised by the application of AI. Another example in the hospitality industry would be if a customer emails to cancel a reservation for a stay in 48 hours’ time. The contact centre might have a service level of one to two days to respond to an email so the customer’s message may not be dealt with in time. However, Sabio has designed a use case to address this for time critical emails.
The system can identify the email is time critical and use its knowledge to route it directly, answer the question and present a response email back to the customer, who may also be contacted by a live agent if necessary.
For Roberts, examples like this illustrate the direction AI and CCaaS is taking. “The contact centre becomes the eyes and ears of the organisation,” he says. “If you think about the amount of data that comes in from all the relevant channels and you add sentiment analysis and you think about the areas where customers are really excited or really frustrated, you have an enormous amount of data. When it comes to generative AI, data is the new gold.”
