The automation of services to provide a streamlined experience for customers and employees will continue to grow throughout 2023, according to Nathan Ronchetti, Chief Technology Officer at Voiceflex.
The telecommunications service provider has looked at what trends it expects to see within the unified communications and collaboration market over the next 12 months.
Since the UCaaS boom following the Covid-19 pandemic, AI is now crucial to the further development of the communications industry.
Throughout 2022, Voiceflex found that its customers were happy to use automated bots wherever possible.
Ronchetti commented: “Customers now are more than happy to self-serve with the bot if possible.
“Every business looks at how they can streamline any process where they have customer interactions to give that best result to the customer with the least human resources possible.
“People are happy to self-serve themselves rather than sit on the phone for 10 or 15 minutes.”
Due to the rise in automated services, Voiceflex predicts that this trend will continue as we head into 2023 and beyond.
The company is looking to use AI to help integrate communication channels such as Facebook Messengers and WhatsApp into UCaaS platforms.
The idea behind this is to make all the different methods of communication that people want to use accessible to all business sizes.
By deploying AI bots, these integrations can become more seamless, but all bring all communication avenues into one UC platform.
The bots will then assist businesses by pulling data from where it is sorted and into the conversations with the customer without having to do the process manually.
Ronchetti believes automation will play a big part in the UK’s PSTN switch-off in 2025.
He added: “We’ve got the PSTN switch-off coming in 2025, but realistically, people need to move that date forward to the stop sell of 2023.
“There are many lines out there; we’re not going to be able to cope unless the automation is there.
“There’s that many number ports that are going to happen; there are so many new digital lines that need to be set up.
“We’ve got our IP voice product that we’re pushing out as our over-the-top voice product.
“We’ve automated the porting journeys ahead of the PSTN switch-off, and we are going to continue work on taking as much human interaction as possible out of that process.”
If you wish to find out more about Voiceflex, then click here to visit the company’s website.
