UC Advanced - issue #13

CONTACT CENTRES

Making contact Contact centres can improve the experiences for customers, as well as making agents’ lives easier if they embrace AI solutions. Zoom is one company that is looking to disrupt the market by utilising this technology.

Supercharged by AI However, this is where organisations like Zoom come in. They offer all the capability of the legacy systems, but it’s supercharged with AI, says Ben. “At Zoom an AI-first innovation is in our DNA because we’ve always taken that forward-looking approach from the outset: looking at how can technology not just come in and do the norm, but how does it provide it better, faster, easier, cheaper and more efficiently.” Ben says that businesses are now often looking to consolidate their communication technologies – phone, contact centre, call recording – and add AI on top of that to enhance the experience, both internally and externally. “AI is just the norm for us at Zoom,” he adds. “We don’t have any technical debt of having to maintain an on-premise world. We’re able to come in and integrate with what customers already have. We’re not asking them to replace any of their back-end systems, everything’s in this one platform, we do this without any bolt-ons. “The pandemic showed us that technology is a force for good as it provided people with hybrid working and things like that. But it also exposed some of the some of the frailties of a legacy-based, premise-based deployment, because it wasn’t built for that. Now that hybrid working has become the norm, and agents want to work wherever because they work-life balance. You’re looking at the legacy technology being able to provide that and some struggle to do that. This is where there is an opportunity to upgrade.” Experience enhancements Zoom brings numerous advantages to a contact centre operation, such as advanced chatbots, Ben says. “We’ve got Zoom Virtual Agent, which is a low code, low maintenance, natural language conversational chatbot,” he explains. “This takes information about

Contact centres are a fixture in the UK marketplace in many sectors, but often they still rely on legacy technology that has been built up over years rather than embracing new cloud based solutions created with innovation such as artificial intelligence (AI) at their core. This could mean they are losing out on the chance to become more efficient and deliver a better experience to their customers. As Ben Neo, Head of Contact Center and CX sales EMEA at Zoom, notes, in the vast majority of contact centres, the technology is still based on-premise. “Many have got a lot of on-premise contact centre technology sat within organisations because it’s been customised and integrated to the nth degree and people find themselves nervous of changing that,” he says. But now, AI technology is making an impact on the sector. “AI within the contact centre is a disruptive technology that is extremely useful for a customer and an agent, and the business benefits by delivering better service quicker on the terms they want. “But it’s difficult to retrospectively fit that back onto a premise-based infrastructure that’s not set up for that.”

Ben Neo Head of Contact Center and CX sales EMEA