]For more than 18 years now, the Customer Contact Week has been the ultimate event for those interested in the growing field of customer care and service. This year, I was lucky enough to attend the Las Vegas event in person and discover some of the incredible technology being introduced to organisations from around the globe.
If you have visited, seen, or read about Customer Contact Week in the past, you’ll know that this is an event dedicated to delivering the latest technology in customer service to businesses all around the communication space. This year, the discussion continued to feature forward-thinking AI solutions, such as the ThinkOwl customer service desk based on AI.
I caught up with Andreas Rittler, the CEO of ITyX Solutions Inc. and ThinkOwl Inc., to find out more about the increasingly important role of AI in the contact centre.
Tell Us About ITyX and ThinkOwl
Andreas is responsible for both the AI platform from ITyX to automate processes in the background and the AI-based service desk from ThinkOwl. He told me that ITyX was founded in 1996, and the company has been working on next-level technology from the day they were founded. “From day one, we were focused on everything from semantic analysis to computational linguistics and AI, so we really started off in the earliest days of artificial intelligence.”
Today, ITyX has more than 200 installations worldwide, and over the years, they’ve learned everything they need to know about implementing next-level algorithms into business systems — and what is working out well and what isn’t.
“We’ve proven that AI customer service works, and we’ve done that with companies from every industry, from FedEx to Volkswagen, Samsung and more.”
ThinkOwl is a cloud based service that learns from the behavior of the agent and is a customer service solution that gets smarter every time you use it. “We can take use cases from any channel, put all the data that companies need together, and use algorithms to analyse the information on behalf of that company, enrich it, and process it without human intervention.” ThinkOwl is even effective for extremely complicated spaces too, like the legal and healthcare verticals, which makes it particularly impressive in a world focused on better customer service.
How Do You Make AI and Analytics your Primary Focus?
With ThinkOwl, Andreas has essentially turbo-charged the standard helpdesk case management software, giving businesses more opportunities to automate repetitive tasks and understand the data they’re collecting through every interaction. Andreas told me:
“The first step for us is making the learned knowledge in a company available to everyone in the organisation; then we can begin to look at other things too, like making this knowledge available to customers in the form of an AI-based self-service.”
Aside from their focus on AI, ThinkOwl also have a strong system in place for analytics. They can conduct real-time analytics to find out what people are saying about a brand, and what type of communications are taking place, from any news feed, forum, or any other data source that’s accessible. “If people are mentioning topics in email, for instance, the system recognises that. It’s constantly listening and monitoring everything to give you actionable, real-time reports that you can use to improve and grow your organisation.”
All that, and ThinkOwl is incredibly easy to onboard too. Andreas told me that all the company really needs is the opportunity to access the right data. If a company can either make the information they want to analyse available to the application or upload it to the cloud, then everything will be analyzed what people are talking about and what topics have a correlation and in which way. “We grew up in an unstructured world, so we don’t mind what format the data is in or from what channel it is coming from.”
How Has the Customer Contact Week Event Been for You?
I was keen to get Andreas’ opinion on the nature of the CCW event and how he was feeling about the experience so far. He told me that at least for the US market, it seems to be the “ultimate” event to be at. “There are always so many different technologies here to explore. One thing I’ve really noticed a focus on this year is omnichannel. Of course, there’s interest in AI too, but people also want to know more about setting up omnichannel and automation.”
There’s also been a lot of insight into the possibilities of integration at CCW this year, and that’s something that seems to mesh well with the ThinkOwl approach. Andreas told me that his company doesn’t care about which third-party systems their customers are using — they can pull data out from anywhere. “We had one customer with thirteen different third-party systems, and we pulled all the data for them into a single system.”
What Does the Road Ahead Look Like for You?
For ITyX and ThinkOwl, the road ahead looks undeniably positive. Andreas told me that ThinkOwl is now officially in production and ready to go to the market at a larger scale. They’re planning on selling their solutions through partners, and they already have one particularly large partner in the U.S., although they’re looking for other ways to expand their reach around the world.
