18 01732 759725 CALL CENTRE bin department. Let the people who are responsible for those services also be the people that handle those customers and have that customer interaction.” Jurgen Hekkink “We sometimes use the tagline ‘everyone’s an agent’. And what we mean by that is rather than saying ‘I’ll send this to the relevant department and get back to you’, the relevant department becomes more front-end-friendly and is able to solve people’s problems themselves. You don’t have to have the customer team shielding the rest of business from customers as if they were bad things you want to avoid talking to. We’re trying to bring businesses closer to their customers, but you need the right products and a lot of capability to do that.” Will Blench 5 Things are moving fast, so you need to start exploring AI now “Futurologist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, recently brought out a new book, The Singularity is Nearer, in which he predicts that by 2029 AI will be equal to human intelligence and that by 2045 AI and human intelligence will have merged. One very important point he makes is that technological development and progress is not a linear path. You can’t look back at what’s happened over the last five years and expect to see a similar rate of change in the next five years. Change is exponential and each new development creates a feedback loop that makes change happen faster and faster. I think we will see that in our industry as well. If you don’t start on this AI journey now, don’t be surprised if in a year’s time you’ve been left behind. One thing we say to customers is you don’t have to go all-in on AI, but you do need to start exploring it and start learning from it, because it will move forward very fast.” Jurgen Hekkink Anywhere.now agent. The orchestration layer lets you determine which LLMs and which data repositories you bring into that contact centre process.” Will Blench “Orchestration is important because AI is good when you give it specific tasks to do. I liken it to what we do in cloud architecture with microservices. You build Agentic AI models to do a specific task and then have orchestration to link those different Agentic AI components. Within our orchestration platform we normally have one AI agent that listens into the conversation and recognises when, for example, a knowledge agent needs to be called because certain information needs to be searched for. Or maybe a verification identification agent can be used up front so when someone calls in and says ‘I need to talk about my mortgage renewal’, AI can recognise this and automatically send the call to an Agentic AI module to verify the customer before routing the verified caller to an agent who now knows the customer is who they say they are. The power of AI lies in supporting a lot of little tasks to enhance the whole customer interaction process, and to do that you need a good orchestration framework to pull in those capabilities in a consistent, structural way within certain security compliance frameworks and within certain boundaries.” Jurgen Hekkink 4 Boundaries between front office and back office will disappear, enabling AI‑assisted agents to become problem‑solvers “What we will start to see is the boundary between front office and back office almost disappear, with customer service embedded throughout an organisation. There won’t be a contact centre person that answers calls and passes work on to the back office. Instead that person will be responsible for everything, front office and back office. Why have a front office that can’t specifically fix a problem? In a local council, if someone has a specific problem with bins, for example, why not route them straightaway to the unexpected questions and lack of trust in AI services mean human interaction won’t disappear completely.” Jurgen Hekkink 3 Orchestration is essential for taking the next step and using AI to address inefficiencies in the back office “Customer interactions aren’t as good as they should be, and it’s not the front end that’s the problem, it’s the back office. Everyone has experience of this: you make a call; you talk to an agent; you wait for the agent’s window to pop up; ‘Oh, I can’t find your data’; ‘Can you spell your name?’; then you’re transferred to somebody else and have to start all over again…The back office and front office are two pieces of the same puzzle. The talking-to-the-user bit is now pretty much solved, technically. Today, the final frontier is the back office and what you will increasingly see is people like us asking to solve those problems, aligning the orchestration layer to Microsoft and Teams, building workflows for business processes and leveraging whatever LLM the client wants to access, while also enabling a caller to start a conversation on WhatsApp or iMessage, then switch to a voice or video conversation, and back again, or to an autonomous ...continued Jurgen Hekkink
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