UC Today Meets InGenius CTO, Peter Hillier

A day in the life of a Chief Technology Officer

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Unified Communications

Published: January 23, 2018

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

As one of the world’s most widely recognisable CTI solution providers with a customer base that stretches around the globe, InGenius is a hugely successful company that works hard to deliver the best results for their partners and customers.

In order to find out a little bit more about the history of the brand and what lengths its employees have gone to get the company where it is today, we decided to meet up with InGenius CTO, Peter Hillier.

Having been raised in a family where computers were always around, Hillier took an interest in them from an early age and claims to have started learning basic computer programming from as young as 11.

What started out as a hobby soon blossomed into something more and, after hearing that he could actually make a career out of doing something that he loved, he decided to enrol in an engineering course at university before switching over to computer science, so he could focus more exclusively on computing.

After graduating, Hillier joined Nortel’s Norstar division where he worked primarily in CTI and was responsible for building a software toolkit or API that third party developers could build on – a trend that has been consistent throughout his career.

Over the next few years, Hillier’s career went from strength to strength, gaining experience in various roles until he was eventually given a new opportunity to go and work at Mitel, at what he refers to as the peak of his ‘coding phase.’

While at the company, Hillier was responsible for helping Mitel make their transition over to SIP, setting up interops with third parties and branching out into the UC space, working with SIP audio/visual and mobile technologies through the MiCollab platform.

As Mitel’s Portfolio Architect, he gained a lot of core knowledge on networking and networking practices and says that

“Those early experiences in learning how voice gets transported across networks really helped me design systems with a full understanding of how a user would use them, how a business person would sell them and how a support person would support them.”

Moreover, by working with product managers and various development shops, Hillier gained valuable insight into how customer problems were solved and how numerous different engineering teams were run.

It was at that stage in his career when Hillier was first introduced to Rich Loen and InGenius, an innovative start-up that was developing a SIP based phone for Mitel at the time, and, after working with the company for a number of years, he eventually joined them full time as their Chief Technical Officer.

After joining the company, rather than looking at the InGenius CTI software itself, one of the first things Hillier decided to do was learn everything he could about Salesforce, one of the CRM platforms InGenius integrates with, to determine how it is used, what it can do and how InGenius could help improve that service.

After filling in those gaps and seizing those opportunities to improve the service capabilities of the InGenius product, Hillier then took over the engineering department and used his wealth of experience from previous roles to improve the company’s roadmap policy and introduce some of those big brand standard processes into the start-up environment to make things run more efficiently.

When asked about where InGenius will go from here, Hillier told us how he, like many others, feels that artificial intelligence will play a big part in the future of CTI. At present the company is in the process of tying together all the different areas of communication modern contact centres offer.

One example he used was the rise of IoT and how things like intelligent routing can be used to direct calls to specific departments based on what machines have learned from the caller before speaking to them directly.

“If, for example, a lightbulb goes out on a smart fridge, that information is sent immediately to the company and we can direct the caller straight through to the service department without having to ask about the nature of the problem.”

Cutting back on call duration, increasing agent efficiency and improving the CX are all benefits AI can offer to contact centres and, given that Hillier has already mentioned that the wheels are in motion, we can expect to see much greater AI capabilities in the InGenius offering being released over the next few years.

Artificial IntelligenceCRMCustomer ExperienceDigital Transformation
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