Connect, an international leader in technology-enabled customer experience (CX), has acquired Elerian AI, a specialist in conversational AI optimised contact centres.
This acquisition uniquely positions Connect to provide digital assistants that provide natural, frictionless caller experiences, which allow our customers to scale their contact centres to meet ever-growing demand, improve customer loyalty and advocacy all whilst reducing costs, according to Martin Cross, President at Connect.
Elerian AI was founded in 2021 in response to the growing need to help contact centre operators deploy CX AI into the business.
“We operate in an environment where AI is becoming pervasive in how companies engage with their customers,” explains Elerian AI founder and CEO, Dion Millson. “While business leaders intuitively understand its potential impact , AI technology is advancing rapidly and leaders struggle to navigate this dynamic landscape to find and implement solutions that work at scale in enterprise environments, delivering natural, fluent experiences for their customers, while generating a return on investment.”
Outcome focused approach
“With contact centres struggling to continuously reduce costs while providing great customer service to growing caller volumes, our mission has been to prove that voice-based digital assistants can offer a great, human-like caller experience,” continues Millson.
“Elerian engages from a C-suite level down about how to operationalise and develop technology solutions that align with a their unique requirements, because building AI into the business is more than a box-drop exercise.”
For instance, Millson explains that businesses need to consider how they localise the language models and make a solution work in local conditions in response to different accents, dialects and jargon, or factors such as background noise to ensure it is fit for purpose. By training the language models on your customer interactions, for example your voice recordings, we dramatically improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the AI.
“These localisations and personalisation around your customers are critical for the AI engine to understand what the caller is saying as it impacts the quality of every response and action down the line.”
Elerian AI also adds value to the contact centre modernisation process by understanding how AI technology can best support the business, including redesigning old manual workflows for inbound and outbound contact to optimise the use of human, voice AI and digital channels to improve customer experience.
Shared vision
According to Cross, Elerian AI is extremely attractive due to a common outcomes-based, services-led, technology-enabled approach to the CX market.
“As an innovative company focused on CX innovation, Elerian AI shares a very similar philosophy, approach and style,” states Cross.
“Both companies share the belief that an outcomes-based approach to AI implementations ultimately delivers real returns and exceptional experiences for customers. We share the same vision in terms of where the contact centre market needs to go when embracing agentic AI.” From an Elerian AI perspective, Millson says the acquisition will give the company the ability to scale and expand its reach into new markets. “We didn’t have the human resources to grow and consult on a larger basis, nor the geographic presence.” Connect operates on four continents, with an established presence in its home market of the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States, India and South Africa.
“By joining Connect, we can take what we’ve built and scale it with the resources and international footprint that Connect already has in place,” adds Millson.
CX AI powered by Elerian
Following the acquisition, Connect will deliver even greater CX outcomes realised by the Elerian AI solution, leveraging the company’s industry-leading pool of expertise and practical knowledge to provide the foundation to make it work at scale.
“The Elerian AI and Connect approach aims to use technology to transform your business, rather than merely changing out the technology from one system to another,” elaborates Cross.
“This business transformation is about using the right tools, at the right place, at the right time. Elerian AI gives us the capability to better help clients understand customer conversations and use these insights to reimagine workflows to free human capital to focus on value-adding tasks, scale the business through voice and digital automation, and increase customer advocacy by delivering exceptional CX,” he concludes.
To learn how this acquisition strengthens our ability to deliver intelligent, outcomes-led CX at scale, contact us at info@weconnect.tech
Ingrid Green
Group Marketing DirectorT: +27 10 476 0300 | M: +27 73 647 6538
W:weconnect.tech
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