What technologies and platforms are most in demand from employees and consumers?
Over the last year, the modern workplace has experienced significant changes, largely driven by advancements in AI and automation.
GenAI has enabled rapid innovation and deployment of solutions for a wide range of industries, including financial services, retail, healthcare and business process outsourcing units.
One major shift has been the increased reliance on AI agents to automate routine tasks and provide personalised support. These automated assistants are now capable of handling more than 80 per cent of common customer and employee inquiries, offering 24/7 service across multiple channels and languages.
The integration of AI-powered personal assistants helps employees to handle mundane tasks such as information retrieval, HR requests and drafting emails. This automation not only improves response times, but also allows employees to focus on more complex and creative tasks, thereby boosting overall productivity and satisfaction.
Or for certain teams such as the finance department, AI assistants can find and generate answers and summarise, such as extracting key insights from large volumes of financial reports and market analysis to answer questions for financial advisors.
In the end user sphere, thanks to the growing acceptance of AI-driven applications, the customer service sector is changing forever too.
Three-quarters (76 per cent) of UK consumers agreed that when an organisation uses the latest AI-powered, automated assistant technology, it means their request is handled faster and more accurately.
In fact, leveraging AI agents could lead to an increase in brand love and loyalty. A huge 87 per cent of UK Gen Z respondents said companies that use the latest automated assistant technology show they value their time and 75 per cent that it shows they respect them as a customer.
The Channel can play an important role in helping organisations to navigate the evolving, complex landscape of technology stacks so that they can meet these trends and demands, and unlock value with AI across every enterprise.
What trends are you seeing from call and contact centres?
AI can transform your contact centre software by boosting efficiency, agent satisfaction and customer happiness. Tools that combine conversational AI and generative AI offer contact centres a comprehensive solution.
An AI agent can handle routine customer inquiries, live translations, post-call tasks such as wrap up transcripts, and FAQs across all channels and languages. It can also handle intelligent call routing to direct customers to the most suitable agent and provide real-time guidance and information during calls, minimising wait times and improving first-contact resolution.
AI learns and gets smarter too so it can enhance future customer conversations by learning from customer intent, preferences and past behaviours.
We’ve seen our platform improve agent productivity by 20 per cent and increase customer satisfaction score by 25 per cent on average - and that’s just the beginning.
Our recent survey of call centre agents shows appetite too. Almost three-quarters (74 per cent) of UK agents agreed they’d like to see more use of automated assistants to give them more time to cross sell or upsell customers. Seventy one per cent UK customer service agents also agreed that the increasing implementation of automated assistants would have the potential to make them more satisfied and committed to their job because they’d be handling less mundane questions, showing it improves staff retention as well.
How can MSPs, resellers and VARs deliver the best value through genAI powered technologies?
Partners, resellers, MSPs and integrators are crucial in ensuring as many enterprises as possible can take advantage of genAI and meet the growing demand for business-grade solutions and use cases that save time and power experiences. Partners and integrators have the unique ability to get under the skin of enterprises, and find the root cause of inefficiencies and where automation could make the most difference.
Crucially, they hold the relationship, capacity and capability to educate, grow and scale, driving different vendors to be part of the conversations at the right time. Moreover, partners play a critical role in building or integrating new systems without sacrificing advantages of existing systems to prevent rip and replace.
Working in partnership with best-in-breed genAI platform vendors that are fully invested in driving customer success is paramount. As technology complexity grows each day, so does the time and effort needed from both software providers and partners and integrators to make partnerships and deployments successful. A market-leading partnership programme must focus on flexibility, support, growth opportunities and a shared mindset.
Fostering trust, collaboration and effective post-sales support will equate to a high impact on revenue growth too. Transforming employee and customer experience challenges, and improving retention and loyalty will also make partners indispensable.
How can partners help enterprise customers to test and learn genAI solutions?
Partners can start customers with less disruptive use cases such as FAQ automated assistants and a singular deployment focus such as search, chat or agent enablement, then move through maturity stages. Next it could be AI deployments for multiple touchpoints and channels, to a fully AI native contact centre, to a complete AI corporate strategy where every business department is innovating and deploying new use cases.
A search AI bot, for example, is a good route to entry. A conversational search assistant powered by advanced retrieval-augmented generation can help deliver highly relevant, accurate, contextual and personalised search results to all users. With a platform such as ours, large language models and generative AI technologies discover user intent from natural human chat or voice utterances, and then return search results based on intent, preferences and behaviours through a virtual assistant or a traditional search bar on the web or mobile channels.
This goes beyond traditional keyword-based search to bring the most relevant search results. With deep learning and self-optimising AI capabilities, it continuously learns and delivers an improved search experience.
Industry-specific challenges and solutions are a good route too and partners can have in-depth conversations to understand what application can make the biggest difference. Benefits for industries include:
• Finance: From fraud detection to investment strategies, AI can help with risk management, automate customer service and streamline operations.
• Retail: AI can provide personalised shopping experiences, manage inventory and optimise supply chains, as well as help retailers understand customer preferences and increase basket spend.
• Manufacturing: AI optimises production processes, predicts maintenance needs and improves quality control that, in turn, boost productivity and reduce manufacturing costs.
Specific genAI use cases include:
• Customer service: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle customer inquiries around the clock and provide quick responses. This resolves issues fast and frees up human agents for more complex tasks.
• Personalised marketing: AI analyses customer data to create custom marketing campaigns to help target the right audience with the right message, improving engagement and conversion rates.
• Product design: AI generates design ideas, optimises prototypes and predicts performance outcomes to speed up the design process and foster innovation in product development.