Q&A: Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer, Sabio
Sabio Chief Innovation Officer Stu moves customer experience forward and gets people innovating. His focus means that he works closely with our partners at Google and Twilio. An awesome orator, Stu often presents at our regular webinars and events.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’m Stuart Dorman the Chief Innovation Officer at Sabio. I have been at Sabio since it was a start-up 20 years ago and have watched it grow to a Pan-European customer service technology provider with over 800 colleagues across Europe. Its been a really exciting journey so far and we continue to grow rapidly. We are all passionate about technology and how it can be used to improve customer experiences.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
At Sabio we know that customer service for many organisations remains impersonal, disjointed and inefficient. Our mission is to improve this by working with our clients to enable brilliant customer experiences through innovative technology solutions, specialist consultancy and managed services.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
We start by focusing on empowering the end customer with innovative digital self-service technology coupled with great design. We specialise in designing experiences that use conversational AI technology across voice, email and messaging channels to create easy to use self service solutions.
Secondly, we focus on empowering our clients employees with solutions that drive quality, effectiveness and productivity. We specialise in contact centre routing technology and smart agent desktop tools managed and optimised from the cloud to support our clients customer service centres.
Finally, we focus on empowering businesses to make better decisions with insight and analytics. We specialise in speech analytics, voice of the customer and work force optimisation technology coupled with the industries best consultants This enables a deeper understanding of customers across the entire customer journey to drive productivity, higher sales, better experiences and competitive insight.
What advantage does it add?
Our solutions help organisations to improve their customer experience in the most efficient way possible. Digital transformation up until now has mainly affected customer experiences across web and mobile. For many organisations the contact centre has been left behind. The next wave of digital transformation will impact across every aspect of the customer journey. We are working at the forefront of this change by migrating our clients contact centres to the cloud and applying AI to every customer touchpoint.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
Today our product implementations are typically based around helping our clients migrate their contact centres to the cloud. This unlocks the ability to deliver transformational customer experiences. We are also implementing AI to engage with customers to get answers straight away or to find the correct person to solve the problem.
Our clients are increasingly adopting agile approaches to implement technology where change is continuous and new functionality and refinements to experiences drop on a weekly basis. This is a cultural shift for many organisations so can take time to embed but we believe that this is the essence of true digital transformation.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
One of the great examples is the speech recognition platform we build for Marks and Spencer to automate calls to stores, increase personalization, and better serve its customers through digitally enabled contact centres. The case study is featured on the Google Cloud website as a CCAI best practice: https://cloud.google.com/customers/marks-and-spencer
Are there other companies you partner with?
As a systems integrator we have many valued partners and always select best of breed technologies to work with. We work with providers such as Avaya, Genesys and Twilio for cloud contact centre technology and Google for AI and data analytics solutions. Contact centres also rely on many specialist technologies for areas such as workforce management and speech analytics where we partner with Verint. We complement this with our own suite of products that help us to manage and optimise these solutions as well as gathering data form customers.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2021 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2020?
Some of our retailers are seeing unprecedented demand where as others are struggling with the changing face of the high street and the rapid shift to ecommerce. I believe that a new cohort of customers are being forced to adopt digital channels and this behaviour will largely stick. The challenge now is to treat your digital properties as you would your shop floor. Use technology to observe online behaviour and make sure that the human touch is tehre if customers need help. This is particularly important with the new wave of customers that are less confident with digital and need a safety net or a helping hand form the contact centre which has to be embedded in the journey more seamlessly.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
We have been building digital tools that link the contact centre to digital experiences for years now. It’s great to see our vision for a joined-up customer service being adopted by forward thinking retailers. The contact centre is the new front line in customer service and is now being recognised as a strategic asset for many retailers.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
Sabio has made a number of fantastic acquisitions recently and have a new CEO with clear vision for our growth over the next 5 years. Retail is one of our largest verticals and we will continue to grow our specialisation in this sector. We can see clear opportunities to help our retail clients to accelerate the migration to cloud and deploy AI across every customer touchpoint.
To find out how Sabio can help your retail operation visit Sabio online at www.sabiogroup.com
