Q&A with Rob Allman: TTEC Digital’s Google expansion into United Kingdom and Ireland

In the ever-evolving world of customer service, organizations are constantly seeking innovative ways to enhance experiences for their customers and employees. At the forefront of this strategic move is the integration of generative AI within the contact center. Generative AI, including enterprise search, call summarization, and advanced fraud detection capabilities, is revolutionizing the landscape of customer conversations. It is drastically reducing agent and customer effort, producing more reliable insights at significant scales from what were previously manual tasks, and providing more natural and human-like automated assistance in the moment of interaction. TTEC Digital is continuing to help our clients leverage innovative technologies to fuel superior customer experiences globally by expanding our partnership with Google to United Kingdom and Ireland.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Senior Vice President for TTEC Digital, EMEA, Rob Allman, to explore the strategic expansion aimed at bringing transformative solutions to the United Kingdom and Ireland. In this interview, we gained insights from Rob on how innovation, collaboration, and our global expansion are collectively reshaping the future of our partnership with Google and supporting the latest trends in customer experience.

Can you share contact center trends and developments in Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) and how you believe those are shaping the technology landscape?

Rob Allman
The trends we're seeing in EMEA are very similar to global trends that are occurring. Historically, we’ve seen a lot of migrations to the cloud focused on IT modernization and getting out of data centers. Migrating contact centers to the cloud is evolving and is now seen as fundamental to driving business transformation.

What this means for customer experience (CX) will have some profound implications for both the customer and how organizations think about CX. The customer wants to be understood and for things to happen quickly and with personalization, without having to put much effort into making that happen. Organizations want to generate repeat business and to retain clients while improving processes and reducing costs.

With the combination of hyperconnectivity and hyperintelligence available to us today, we’re able to examine and understand how people are connecting, the content they’re engaging with, and the context of why they're engaging. We can predict. We can understand their propensity. We can then personalize the customer journey and be far more effective for that customer relationship.

This combination has also propelled us into a world of hyperpersonalization and automation, born out of the core tenants of AI. We can evolve customer touchpoints to a point where customers can almost configure their own experiences and how they interact with organizations. Likewise, organizations can be much more proactive with their customers in a more cost-effective way that is far more likely to create a desirable outcome for both the customer and the organization.

With AI, governance and compliance become incredibly important but can also become incredibly complex. The next trend organizations and market leaders need to address will be responsible AI. They’ll need to consider how to remove bias, how to govern policy, and how to ensure data security in a consistent and effective way. Today, we're at a relatively low AI maturity phase. In the EU, the first AI act has passed, so there are some guidelines in place, but organizations must develop a maturity in how they think and execute on responsible AI to maintain the trust of customers.

How does Google’s Cloud help us address these trends?

Rob Allman

Google is born in the cloud and has been at the forefront of understanding huge data sets. It has billions of data points that help improve accuracy and relevancy, which is profoundly important in real time with customers. It’s been one of the first organizations to prioritize personalization in the contact centers. Being an innovative disruptor, Google is positioned to design and build solutions that fit the modern world in terms of hyperconnectivity, hyperproductivity, and hyperintelligence. Google’s approach is data driven and data rich, enabling analytics seamlessly.

What does TTEC Digital’s expansion into the UK and Ireland mean to TTEC Digital clients?

Rob Allman
This expansion allows us to offer clients in United Kingdom and Ireland the ability to work with Google to extend the benefits of these trends to their customers. Our clients can now create an environment for their customers where they know them better, value them more, and understand their mindset more clearly with little effort on the customers’ part. They have access to more data that fuels personalized experiences and proactively meets their customer needs.

What future plans does TTEC Digital have in EMEA?

Rob Allman
We’re developing some very exciting methods to evaluate where clients are in their AI journey in the form of an AI readiness assessment and an AI-enabled CX Maturity Workshop. In order to remain competitive, organizations need to consider how they can introduce AI as an enabler to offering best-in-class CX. These engagements we’re building will help clients incorporate AI into their holistic CX strategic plans and create a road map to move forward. We're beginning to work with clients in the UK and Ireland on these fronts.