The journey of AI from Alan Turing to NFON’s Contact Centre Hub (CC Hub)

Are the robots taking over?

The hype around the new wave of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has been hard to ignore, with experts unsure on whether AI will save the world or end it.

Despite the uproar over the past few months, AI has been around since the 1950’s when Alan Turing, famous for his code-breaking exploits during the Second World War, helped develop a test for machine intelligence.

Here at NFON, we agree that AI holds the potential to deeply impact the way we work. That’s why we’ve been happy to implement the latest wave of Generative AI (Gen AI) technologies from Daktela^[1]to great effect in our own contact centre product, and are excited to see where this journey will take us.

The chatter around CHAT GPT

Large Language Models are part of the evolution in predictive intelligence which are giant statistical probability engines. We don’t want to get too technical here but, if you do want the full lowdown, you’ll find a good explanation in this article in the Economist. These came to our attention last November with the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI. This was rapidly followed by bigger and better Large Language Models from Anthropic, Google, Meta and Open AI again with GPT 4.

With its conversational interface radically simplifying access to AI outputs for new audiences, it’s worth noting that Chat GPT was the fastest app ever to reach 100 million users. TikTok took nine months to reach this milestone whereas Chat GPT achieved it in just three.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, digital technologies and AI are playing an ever-increasing role in our lives through smartphones, social media, driving technologies, the Internet of Things and predictive marketing.

What does the future hold?

While no crystal ball can tell us exactly what twists and turns lie ahead, these are exciting times for our industry. McKinsey predicts Customer Operations are one of four business functions expected to drive 75% of the economic value generated by Gen AI (with Sales and Marketing another). They reckon the integration of Gen AI into customer operations could improve productivity by up to 45 percent^[2].

Far from the gloomy prospect of cataclysmic job losses, we’ve seen digital technologies transform our capabilities, automating the boring, repetitive tasks that none of us liked doing in the first place.

NFON comes to the party

Contact Center Hub’s features reflect this spirit of AI augmenting rather than replacing human intelligence. This innovative technology provides contact centre agents with new opportunities to delight the customer. It enhances job satisfaction and increases the time available for meaningful dialogue with consumers.

As Europe’s leading voice-centric cloud communications provider, for NFON it’s a simple case of building on the services and support we already provide. And of course, we are always concerned about the safety of our AI integrations. That’s why all communication is sent encrypted via a proprietary API to maximise the security of customer data and the protection of personal data when using new AI-technologies^[3].

Why bother with all this? To ensure our clients can meet the ever-increasing expectations of their demanding customers. We’re also, of course, committed to helping our clients improve the efficiency of their contact centre operations. But, above all, it’s about letting everyone out there know they don’t need to go hunting around here, there and everywhere for the latest applications when it’s far easier to get them all with us.

Intelligent features

At NFON, we’re working overtime to stay ahead of the pack and set new standards for voice-centric customer service. What’s more, we have the latest features to prove it.

These include GPT Summarisation which makes it easier to know exactly what’s required with each ticket. Then there’s GPT Compose which lets you get back to customers at speed with well-crafted responses.

Our AI Mailbot efficiently categorises your incoming email. Rapidly learning more about your preferences each time you use it, this clever bot soon delivers time-saving results.

The Realtime Users Widget enables you to see contact centre activity and capacity at any given moment. Moreover, during an ongoing activity, the agent can effortlessly invite or transfer the activity to the selected agent.

When you receive notifications about changes in your tickets or your calendar, you can now quickly move them the Notification Centre by a click of a button.