INTERVIEW Martin Taylor - Content Guru
“For many of our customers the integration is the whole point of us being there.“
Martin Taylor, CEO, Content Guru
The gateway drug to AI
Content Guru has had a blistering three years of 30
per cent year-on-year growth and a headcount which
has grown 42 per cent, just last year, to nearly 300.
Martin Taylor, CEO, spoke to Comms Business to
provide an update on the Storm platform and what
has been behind this spectacular growth story.
Comms Business Magazine
(CBM): Which segment of the
market are you competing in?
Martin Taylor (MT): We tend to
focus on large scale users, 1000+
seats, and are largely competing
against the incumbent, onpremise
type providers. at’s
been interesting, and they have
been well dug-in, but with the
need for omni-channel and the
need for organisations to o er
a clean experience across all of
those channels that has caught
a lot of those old systems on the
hop. Many of them can’t cope
with demands of multi-session
chat or social. e integration of
these voice channels and written
channels in a more integrated
way and making it easier for the
agent as well.
CBM: How are intelligent
automation and deep
integration driving
transformation in the contact
centre?
MT: Automation is where we
came from. Before we did live
agents we did IVR, we launched
our rst SMS based chat bot in
2011 for National Rail Enquiries
on 84950, it’s still going strong
and you can ask it anything
to do with train routes/ times.
at’s an area we have always
been comfortable with and
luckily that’s coming into vogue
again, particularly with the link
to data sources.
AI technologies are driving
more of a conversational
interface now. We are seeing
more of an automated front end,
perhaps the identi cation and
authentication part, and nding
out what the person wants. en
we might bring the human in
and prompt them with the right
information from the relevant
data source. At the end of
the conversation we might be
writing it up automatically too.
rough links to data sources
we are feeding the agents
information during interactions
which typically cuts out that 15-
20 per cent of time which they
use to look things up.
For many of our customers
the integration is the whole
point of us being there. Take the
NHS 111 service, no longer do
callers get taken through a ow
chart called Pathways. Before
we even connect the call we are
checking several di erent health
and care information sources to
see if we know anything about
them. at might be long-term
conditions, end of life care
plans, things that might trigger
an ambulance dispatch or a
recommendation to go to the
emergency department.
CBM: How has the role of
human agents in the contact
centre evolved?
MT: One of the things human
agents don’t like is the repetitive
nature of what do in the call
centre, answering the same
questions over and over again for
example. We are actually asking
agents to be a bit robotic in that
sense which doesn’t always sit
well with the human psyche.
at is also part of what drives
agent churn and dissatisfaction.
ere was a US survey a few
years ago which only 16 per
cent of contact centre agents
declared themselves as satis ed.
e number one source of this
satisfaction is workload, what
we are doing is addressing a
lot of the low value jobs and
veri cation processes. Once we
remove that layer humans are
dealing with the more interesting
stu whcih is intrinsically more
satisfying and varied.
Going forwards it means
we will rely on agents for their
human qualities. e machine
will be doing the heavy lifting
and looking things up and
the agent’s job might be to
empathise and provide a warm
human face. is is all about
improving the Customer
Experience which will be
the prime di erentiator for
organisations and their service
Martin Taylor, CEO,
Content Guru
o erings in the future.
CBM: What is the link between
omni-channel and AI?
MT: I describe omni-channel
as the gateway drug to AI. You
need to have a technology base
which is going to enable you to
ip between the channels the
consumer is going to use at the
time they want to use them.
If they come in on a phone
call you need know that it was
the same person which came
through the chat the day before.
It’s a much more tied together
view of the customer and gives
the AI more to work with.
Ultimately, many businesses
will use AI to interpret vast
pools of unstructured data. Lots
of companies have that data
in the form of things like call
recordings, but they aren’t really
using it to gain insights in the
way they could.
58 | Comms Business Magazine | September 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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