Running a contact centre is expensive. In 2021, 21% of industry professionals perceived their contact centre as a ‘cost centre’, and 11% even went so far as to describe it as a ‘necessary evil’. In recent years, companies in all sectors have been trying to reduce the number of customer service calls made by customers.…

It is often difficult and frustrating to interact with chatbots via voice when they are not designed well. If you’ve ever tried doing something on your phone using Siri or Google Assistant, you’ve probably had situations where you’ve rephrased the same question in what feels like fifty different ways and still not been understood.  Sometimes…

Online and mobile platforms have rapidly expanded over the past decade, resulting in the rise of numerous digital-only challenger banks. Digital first banks like Monzo and Starling, as well as payment platforms like PayPal, Stripe, and Google Pay, are posing significant and unique challenges to traditional banks. In 2022, the fintech industry globally received $28.8…

Despite the rise of online and mobile banking, the contact centre is still the go-to destination for banking customers. While digital services have made basic and repetitive banking tasks more efficient, more complex customer requests still appear to require the intervention of a human contact centre agent or branch representative. In recent years, banks have…

A significant number of businesses still retain the use of touch-tone (DTMF) push-button dialling, a technology that has been in use by the general public since 1963. With this system, customers use the buttons on their telephone keypad to input information and interact with an automated service. Businesses such as banks, internet service providers, and…

Humans and robots have been having conversations for years now in books, films, and on TV, so we’ve been fully primed for some time for fiction to become reality. Not only that, but we know now that we don’t need to be voyaging on the Starship Enterprise to be able to access it.  With the…

There is a simple answer to the question that constitutes the title of this blog. They don’t want to. It is not commercially viable for the likes of Google or facebook to create CIs in the same way that it’s not commercially viable for Macdonalds to sell twice-baked cheese souffles. It’s complicated, it’s time consuming…

The phrase "I'll know it when I see it" has probably been used in one form or another for a very long time, reflecting the fact that the experience of being a human is deeply wrapped up in our ability to use intuition.   As with many aspects of fundamentally human behaviour, language is something that…

Over 80% of businesses fail because of cash flow problems. The vast majority of these failing businesses are micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and they number in the millions. These businesses matter and when they fail, the outcomes are invariably bad for everyone. Failure rates for SMEs are notoriously high at the best of…

Over the last ten years, banks have transformed the way they serve customers. They’ve built mobile apps, improved their websites, and launched chatbots - all of this so their customers can access information and make transactions 24/7. But despite their efforts, banks still have large call centres receiving huge numbers of calls. The Covid pandemic…