Do you absolutely have to move to the cloud first to be able to renew and innovate? No, says Wouter Bakker from Sabio. There are several roads that lead to Rome. What companies could look at more closely: investing in intent recognition and reducing the effort a customer has to make. There is still much to improve.

 

The British system integrator Sabio has made a large number of acquisitions in recent years. Particularly relevant to the Dutch market were the acquisition of the Dutch part of Datapoint in 2017, followed by the acquisition of the Avaya team from KPN (2019). After about fifteen acquisitions since 2015, the company now wants to focus on integrating all acquisitions. In the Netherlands, work is mainly being done to broaden the portfolio.

Expansion capabilities

First of all, Sabio Netherlands has started investing in expanding its capabilities, explains Wouter Bakker, Country Manager Netherlands. “This means that our team of 35 people has invested heavily in skills – which means we are now also at home in Genesys, Twilio, AWS, Verint and Salesforce. As a result, we at Sabio Netherlands have been maneuvered away from an 'Avaya-first label'. In any case, we have an internal standard that everyone spends five percent of their time on learning and development.”

More international cooperation

Secondly, the Dutch team has strengthened its collaboration with Sabio UK (where half of the total of one thousand Sabio colleagues are located). “This ensures that the Dutch Sabio team can be close to the customer, but that implementations and integrations can be carried out by mixed teams. A good example of this is De Volksbank (nu ASN), where we are working on a cloud migration.” Sabio serves approximately sixty customers in the Benelux. In about twenty of them, the collaboration really has a strategic character, aimed at transformation.

And finally, the positioning has been tightened. Sabio now focuses on four different areas: contact center (routing), AI and automation, data (including WFO) and CRM. Hence embracing Salesforce.

Renewal and innovation: increasing urgency

Projects surrounding cloud migrations remain as important as ever - not everyone is 'over' yet. In the meantime, the pressure to innovate and automate in the contact center is increasing: personnel costs are increasing, IT debt is becoming an increasingly important obstacle and innovation with IT is becoming relatively cheaper.

“You can easily do a cloud migration in addition to all your other agile-organized innovation projects.”

Bakker: “Customers often think that they have a technology challenge when it comes to innovation in customer contact: that they must first modernize the infrastructure in the form of cleaning up legacy and switching to the cloud. Only then do they take a series of next steps. At its core, a cloud migration comes down to modernizing something you already have. You don't have to take an agile approach to this: everything between head and tail is clear. You can easily do this in addition to all your other agile-organized innovation projects. A cloud migration can be a good time to take a step back and reexamine your processes and completely redesign them.”

Cloud migration on the horizon?

Bakker sees that there are still contact centers in the market where migration to the cloud is being pushed forward. There may be valid reasons for this, says Bakker: “Internal cycles, financial or in terms of governance, such as contracts. Sometimes there are other priorities. From a technical point of view, a cloud migration can be arranged in a few weeks, but it is no longer an IT project. Such a project often places a burden on the business with a lot of additional work. I also often see dependencies with other projects. International customers also often have an order for the rollout and the Netherlands is usually not at the top of the list.”

Postponement is possible, but can be more expensive

It is not the case that contact centers that have not yet switched to a cloud solution cannot innovate in customer contact, says Bakker. “But then you will have to link things in a different way. And you are more limited in deep integrations – or you run into higher costs. A good example is GenAI and automated conversation summarization. In principle, this is a matter of recording, transcribing, summarizing and writing it away in the right place. But without context about that interaction – for example where in the customer journey your customer is – such a summary is less relevant.”

Context-based call flow

Getting your intent recognition in order should therefore be one of your first steps – also as a follow-up to a cloud migration – says Bakker. “Intent recognition is about more than understanding what the subject of the contact is: it is also about the context. If you know that someone is contacting you who is about to miss a flight, you handle this differently than someone who wants to know about a planned booking that is still weeks away. Urgency is one of the variables that can determine your call flow. By looking at your customer journey in this way, you appear much more customer-oriented.”

Minimize customer effort

If organizations continue to design processes that require the customer to do their best to solve a problem that the company has caused, it increases the chance that some of your customers will simply drop out. “Knowing what your customer is calling about and insight into the context, you can organize that. If you have this in place, automating the handling of customer contacts is one of the next steps. Reducing the effort a customer has to make is only possible if you as an organization also facilitate the seamless integration of the various channels. For this it is useful if you have an integrated platform that works well with your CRM data. Take the integration of Salesforce and Genesys: it is increasingly becoming one platform. It wouldn't surprise me if in five years' time there will simply be one solution and perhaps one company as well,” Bakker suggests.

Website and contact channels

Bakker also continues to encounter another phenomenon: a disconnect between contact channels such as telephone and chat on the one hand and the website on the other. “Anyone who looks for synergy between those two things can gain a lot. After all, nowadays we standardly go to a company's website - to see if a solution or answer can be found, step two is to look for the telephone number. There are still customer service departments that prefer not to make this too clear on their website. But I would prefer to turn it around: make your contact options clearly visible on every web page - albeit appropriate to that page. Because that gives you the first context when a customer makes digital contact. And when that customer contacts you, you immediately have more context as a basis for your automated summary.”

ChatGPT? “I would recommend experimenting to everyone”

In practice, after a cloud migration, companies often want to start with chatbots first and lately also with voicebots. Often there is already a simple standalone chatbot solution available. And GenAI is of course receiving a lot of attention. The rise of GenAI primarily has a democratizing effect, Bakker believes. “What was previously unattainable in AI is now easily available to almost everyone. I would recommend everyone to experiment, but with prompt engineering you have to gain experience.”

Organizations are particularly enthusiastic about the very first results of GenAI, Bakker sees. “Only afterwards will attention be paid to compliance in the field of privacy - this is rarely the top priority when an experiment is started. That's a shame, it should be normal to involve your data protection officer from the very first moment,” Bakker concludes. (Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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