Three things you need to know about the Future of Telephony
As another year draws to a close, it seems as good a time as any to look to the future. There’s certainly plenty to look forward to in the telecoms channel. Change is afoot, and with change comes opportunity. Here are three things the sector should be aware of about the future of telephony in 2024 and beyond. 1.) The copper switch off is getting near People have been talking about the PSTN (copper line) switch off for what seems like years, but the actual event is creeping ever closer. Many channel resellers will use the final countdown to 2025 as a way to promote agile alternatives to legacy copper-based telephony. What seems clear to us is that the switch-off is a marker of the economy’s increasing preference for flexible wireless solutions; those with no need for complex internal or external cabling. However, this does mean businesses are putting a higher dependency on mobile services and Wi-Fi. This brings a range of new opportunities to the channel, from security to integration to automation. These are areas where successful resellers will help customers find the most value from their systems. 2) The AI revolution gathers pace AI has only just started making its mark on business communication, but the opportunities are potentially endless. To take one example, AI can enhance your telecoms offer by bringing hugely valuable analytics capabilities to unified communication (UC) systems. While the metrics and reporting currently available in contact centre platforms may be adequate for performance reporting, that’s only touching the surface of what’s possible. AI-powered analytics promise far greater qualitative insight into how services could be improved, allowing resellers to offer more value to customers. This is especially apparent in systems that automatically ingest audio, running Natural Language Processing (NLP) on all calls to gain a deeper understanding of interactions and the challenges customers and agents face. For the reseller, having the right AI portfolio is likely to become a huge differentiator in the next few years, providing base-wide security benefits, enhanced service quality, higher margins and, most importantly, more trusting customers that form longer-lasting relationships. 3) Companies are becoming digital-first Digital-first businesses rely on digital technology to make them more efficient and customer-focused. To do that they need bandwidth. Connectivity has become the great business enabler of the moment. Those businesses able to adopt cloud services, and run them efficiently via gigabit-capable connections, can adapt best to our technology-driven future. How can the channel help in all this? Selling great connectivity is one way. But where the channel can really make a difference is by helping businesses make all those systems work together, integrating them via professional services and AI to provide a unique bird’s eye view of operational performance and success.
Using AI to transform contact centre performance
Contact centres are under pressure. They’re tasked with improving customer experience while also keeping costs under control. Whether they focus on sales, after sales, customer service or payments, contact centres are often being asked to achieve more with less. One way they can square that circle is through the intelligent application of technology. In particular, modern AI tools allow contact centre leaders to scan mountains of data for valuable insight into customer satisfaction and agent or campaign performance. What’s the practical application of that? Well, before this kind of technology was available, team leaders in contact centres would download the recordings of a small percentage of customer interactions as a quality control measure. Listening to these recordings was a hugely time consuming and somewhat thankless task, but it allowed them to check on agent performance and customer sentiment, albeit in a very limited way. They could check that agents were remembering to read out statutory legal information, for example, or that customers were not being left on hold too long. This was useful-ish, but far from complete. It used a tiny subset of interactions which may or may not have been representative (and given random chance, probably not). But it was the best many contact centres could do with the time and technology they had. The AI revolution is coming to contact centres Compare that with today. Now, AI-powered tools can scan every interaction customers have with your organisation, checking them against a range of performance indicators like speed of resolution, upselling targets or the success of scripts. They can produce reports that clearly show whether you’re meeting targets and where weaknesses in your customer communications may lie. And it’s to harness the power of AI that we developed Elisha Insights, our AI-driven customer analytics platform that is designed to transform how contact centres operate. Elisha Insights offers a host of features already, but it’s a work in progress. We’ll continually add new capabilities to the solution as they become available. Elisha Insights includes: ● Sentiment analysis: Easily monitor the tone of conversations with your customers. Elisha Insights will look for words or phrases that suggest satisfaction or dissatisfaction. If customers are unhappy, it can tag interactions for further investigation. ● Omnichannel analysis: Elisha Insights accepts customer interactions from various sources, including email threads, chat, voice, and video transcripts, and supports multiple languages. ● Customisable performance indicators: Assess how your sales agents upsell to customers, track the resolution of technical support questions, analyse conflict handling, compare interactions against your script or call flow, and much more. ● Seamless integration: Elisha Insights is designed to be used with your current contact centre software and other IT solutions. We offer APIs and embeddable code snippets that facilitate rapid integration. The acceleration of innovation There are plenty of others, but suffice to say that Elisha Insights brings AI-driven tools to your contact centre in an easy and accessible way. Nor do you need expertise in using AI tools or interpreting their results. We carry out the analysis on your behalf, and you simply pay for the analysis you need. You can scale the service up and down to suit your requirements at any given time. At Elisha, we’ve been in the telecoms business for decades, starting right back when VoIP was new and connectivity was sometimes sketchy. We’ve seen so much progress in that time, but AI has the potential to be the most revolutionary innovation of all. These tools are already helping contact centres meet targets and create better customer experiences without piling on cost. With Elisha Insights, we are adopting AI early, and offering our clients and resellers an easy way to get ahead of the game.
AI Analytics: Empower Your Customer Service Now with Elisha Insights
Elisha Insights offers real-time AI analytics and evaluation of customer service interactions for your business. Leveraging the latest advancements in Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing, Elisha Insights stands as the most sophisticated customer service analytics platform available in the market today. Elisha Insights accepts customer interactions from various sources, including email threads, chat, voice, and video transcripts, and supports multiple languages. Its default Speech-to-Text engine can automatically detect over 50 languages, and optional third-party integrations can extend this to over 120 languages and dialects. Elisha Insights AI Analytics Features Define categories for customer interactions effortlessly, and let Elisha Insights automatically classify them. With built-in sentiment analysis, monitoring the tone of conversations with your customers becomes easy. Clients can tailor Elisha Insights to their preferred set of performance metrics and modify them as needed. You can assess how your sales agents upsell to customers, track the resolution of technical support questions, analyze conflict handling, compare interactions against your script or call flow, and much more. Privacy protection remains a priority, as Elisha Insights incorporates built-in Personal Identifiable Information (PII) filtering to ensure the security of your customers’ privacy. Additionally, Elisha Insights does not keep or record any transcripts or recordings it analyzes by default. Elisha Insights is designed for seamless integration with your current IT systems. It offers APIs and embeddable code snippets that facilitate rapid integration. The payment model is based on per analysis, allowing you to pay for only the transcripts we analyze. This approach enables you to scale up or down, knowing your costs will follow suit. Charges are determined per minute of recording or per page of text (500 words) sent for analysis. Elisha Insights revolutionizes your customer service approach. It harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence to provide valuable insights, improve interactions, and boost customer satisfaction. Schedule your demo today by emailing sales@elishatelecom.com and experience the future of customer service with Elisha Insights!