102 I NT E R V I EW Maximising the value of time Anywhere365’s Enrico Karsten explains why cloud-based dialogue management systems have the potential to transform unified communications and customer service Founded in 2012 to help businesses maximise the value of time by reducing unnecessary dialogues, Anywhere365 has developed an award-winning cloud-based contact centre and dialogue management platform for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Over the past decade, the business has expanded significantly and more than 2,000 global enterprises – including Coca Cola, McDonalds, Nestlé and over 30 Fortune 500 companies – have chosen Anywhere365 as their native communication platform. We ask new CEO Enrico Karsten to share his insights into the future of enterprise dialogue management. Many businesses have introduced hybrid or fully remote working models since the pandemic, but what struggles have they faced when trying to ensure that communication remains quick and seamless? Companies have faced serious technological challenges, suddenly needing to rely on internet connections outside of their control for both uptime and security. For many, however, the biggest hurdle was finding a way to keep people connected in the virtual world. They had to ensure that communications were not restricted by time, place or the type of channel, and they had to replicate the human factor to successfully execute dialogues between people and technology. What impact has the pandemic had on customer service? Pre-pandemic, customers were used to smooth interactions and fast services, but it’s been challenging for businesses to meet these expectations over the past two years. This, combined with the difficulties of keeping the workforce connected and motivated, has led to less satisfying experiences for both customers and employees. However, the pandemic has also shown that we can achieve a much higher level of flexibility with a hybrid working environment that is supported by intelligent connectivity technology. Now that this is commonly accepted, there will be an enormous improvement in the overall experience. Please tell us how Anywhere365 can help businesses to overcome these issues and ensure employees remain productive and customers enjoy their experience. The beautiful thing about Anywhere365 is that we’re not focused on growing the contact centre, but instead aiming to reduce unnecessary dialogues for both employees and customers. We want to make reactive customer contact obsolete to give back valuable time to both organisations and their customers. For example, long before the pandemic, our founder invested in our own low-code automation platform. Now, our customers can quickly design automated dialogue flows by dragging and dropping nodes without codes to a canvas and deploy them with the click of a button. Another great example is our licensing model, which is primarily based on consumption rather than the number of agent seats. This enables organisations to rethink the contact centre and make all their Microsoft Teams-powered knowledge workers part of every omnichannel customer conversation – without having to pay for all those seats. BY R E B E CCA G I B SON “ Our ultimate goal is to make Anywhere365 the dialogue routing hub of choice for the Microsoft ecosystem”
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