IntelePeer Chief Experience Officer: How We Deliver AI-Powered Communications Automation

‘Our vision is really 100 percent automation in the traditional contact center,’ says IntelePeer’s Matt Edic.

Vendors and solution providers are swiftly adding artificial intelligence to level up their products and services. IntelePeer is no exception. The company, which recently unveiled a new round of funding totaling $140 million to support its continued development of generative AI services, provides a communications automation platform.

MES Computing spoke with IntelePeer's Chief Experience Officer, Matt Edic, about how the company is leveraging AI to deliver automated customer service and front-office support to midmarket organizations.

Can you provide an overview of what IntelePeer offers?

We are a solutions provider in the communication space. The underlying technology we have is what we call a communications automation platform.

We sell solutions off that platform, but the platform itself is like a three-layer cake.

The base layer is a communications layer—we have a Voice-over-IP based infrastructure.

We also have an SMS infrastructure and then there’s a middle layer of automation on top of that, a communications infrastructure.

The top layer of the cake is an AI layer where we’re leveraging AI, conversational AI, [and] generative AI to inform the automation layer and the communication [layers].

We are really focused on interactions ... our customers’ interactions with their customers.

How does the platform work?

When a call comes in, we’ve got that deep stack. We can be the provider.

In other words, you have the phone number, bring it in or customers can bring their own provider, but we provide that voice interface.

Customers call into ... an intelligent virtual assistant and we can handle that interaction with the caller.

Our vision is really 100 percent automation in the traditional contact center. Customers call and they have a question that they really could have probably self-helped if only they could have found the information. Let’s get those calls taken care of.

We can do that in an automated way. The voice quality is good. The AI intelligence is good—call it a low value to the contact center, meaning they’re not going to make money off that interaction, they’re going to answer a question. It is important, but they need to answer that question: ‘Where's my order?’ [for example].

How does AI play into that?
Self-service isn’t a new concept, but we can do that with great, realistic voices and in a way that reduces the amount of staff needed in a contact center.

And while we’re not exactly going to march in the AI bots tomorrow and kick the humans out, you know, the contact center is often [prone] to turnover and they’re constantly training.

What we’re really focused on is removing the lower value—very repetitive tasks that work well for automation and replacing that with our automation and automating the workflows.

Which verticals are your customers primarily in?

We’re focused on health care, finance, we’ve got some fun opportunities in the quick service restaurant industry .... fast food, you want to place an order—those are repetitive transactions and they are valuable because you want to get that order.

What value does your service bring to midmarket businesses and organizations?

Let’s talk about health-care providers or dental offices, maybe not the major hospitals but a health-care firm that has five ,10 or 20 offices., having a consistent front end: 'I need to make an appointment schedule,' 'Can I chew gum with my new braces?' We can handle all those interactions that someone calls in for. We can do the automation of scheduling and changing appointments, [answering questions like] where’s your location and what are your business hours ... all those front-end features that might be traditionally staffed by a front-office manager, those are very easily automated.

If for some reason, language becomes an issue and AI isn’t understanding ... then we’ll connect to a human being as well. The goal is not to trap someone in a never-ending loop of bad technology, but to intelligently move it along.