ARN - blueAPACHE lays out its redesign of managed services in the AI era

Governance, culture, platform integration, service transformation, automation and the future of customer interactions.

blueAPACHE has redesigned the way it delivers managed and professional services as demands of AI, cyber security, compliance and digital transformation continue to put constraints on its customers.

At the launch of its “re-engineered managed services strategy” in Sydney in mid-October, its chief executive officer (CEO) Michael Zuppa said governance, security, observability, operational integration and executive-led cultural change must be in place before organisations accelerate automation and AI initiatives.

“Our customers want better experiences, and our regulators want assurances,” he told attendees at the event. “Then you’ve got security threats evolving at pace.

“All of this is happening at the same time, and these demands are competing for the same organisational capacity … that’s the challenge.”

The real hinderance to customer innovation isn’t “ambition”, but complexity – which is “outpacing organisational capacity”, Zuppa noted.

“It’s a challenge of scale, capacity and an organisational shift to a new way of working,” he said. “That is what I mean by the mid-market innovation gap.

“Innovation isn’t constrained by ideas; it’s constrained by capacity. The conversation needs to change.”

According to Zuppa, the path forward is to “simplify, reduce complexity, avoid connecting disparate systems, and focus on processes that are controllable”.

“Partnering is key … partnering with platforms, skilled providers and an ecosystem that is connected,” he said. “Driven together on a common foundation, then amplifying from there.

“This is where we use the embedded capabilities of those platforms and partners to amplify outputs and multiply the impact of our current resources. It must be focused on outcomes and use cases that deliver tangible benefits back into the business and ensure technology is aligned to those objectives.

“That’s going to allow mid-market organisations to differentiate, move faster and surpass what the market would otherwise expect.”

A broader example of this approach is blueAPACHE running approximately120 inbound customer routes across its customer base. It uses the Zoom Contact Centre platform to automatically recognise callers and connect them to the right team regardless of which number they dial.

Native integration with ServiceNow means interaction records are created automatically. This gives technicians customer context from the first second, while real-time dashboards provide visibility into staffing requirements throughout the day.

“A key component of this whole integration stack was bringing it into the core ITSM [IT service management] platform so that our service agents don’t have to swivel-chair,” he told ARN. “They don’t need to look into three different applications.

“They’re working out of one service workspace where they’re doing the ticketing, voice and troubleshooting analysis. It all comes together and is connected within their one service workspace.

“That was the most important thing: making it streamlined and seamless in the way communication happens.”

According to Zuppa, blueAPACHE didn’t know that it could adopt certain capabilities within the budgets and complexities of how it runs its contact centre solution.

“We evaluated, through our partner ecosystem, options that could not only do what we were currently doing with our legacy-based communication platform, but also where we saw the market going,” he explained. “We wanted to ensure there was full AI capability embedded from the ground up.

“It could handle transcriptions, recordings, voice and real-time sentiment on every single call.”

Customer experience

Those were the things blueAPACHE was evaluating, which proved the MSP had the ability to have full sentiment analysis across every single call, as well as summarised transcriptions automatically populated into each interaction.

This is valuable when considering details for professional teams or when looking at interactions at a later date, explained Zuppa.

“What we found during these assessments was that other elements within contact centre management, particularly the quality management side, are generally delivered through third-party OEMs or integrations and usually come with a very different cost profile,” he said.

“One area that people often avoid is workforce management because it is generally expensive, hard to implement and time-consuming.

“The way Zoom brought it in was at less than a tenth of the cost of anything else we looked at and probably a tenth of the complexity to implement.”

“It wasn’t really something we would bring in, but because it was available, it has made a massive difference; tying in automatic scheduling and skill-based routing enhanced the level at which we can route and manage communications beyond what we were hoping to achieve.”

The next evolution of contact centres is being driven by AI-powered interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities, particularly for handling structured and repetitive customer interactions.

“These are sophisticated agents that can talk in any language, translate it and transcribe it into any language in real time,” Zuppa explained.

It follows very structured workflows, which is typically what many contact-centre agents are doing.

“They also have the ability to reference large knowledge bases curated for a specific service in seconds,” he said. “What that means is higher-quality first interactions in many cases.

“They’re more accurate and more consistent. It is creating concerns at the lower level of structured work.”

However, because blueAPACHE deals with complex IT-based issues, there is still a need for human interaction.

“It’s about how we surface all of that information to our agents in real time as quickly as possible, while also deferring lower-level work that isn’t a good use of their time,” he said. “A simple password reset, a service request or similar task can be handled through natural language interaction.

“The IVR agents can populate the ticketing systems with those details automatically.”

Running fast

Service interactions are likely to shift towards customer-side agents, with users increasingly talking or chatting directly with an AI agent on their device rather than relying on voice calls.

Although organisations will still need to accommodate customers who prefer voice, he expects autonomous endpoints capable of self-healing, self-diagnosing problems and making recommendations to resolve issues in real time.

However, Zuppa noted that successful AI adoption requires more than technology. Without executive sponsorship, organisational buy-in and cultural change, transformation efforts are unlikely to succeed this change won’t happen.

“This is not just a technology problem to solve. It is an organisational and cultural shift, and a new way of working that we all have to adopt,” he said.

“This is a completely cultural change, meaning that we have to enable our staff. We’ve got to change the way we allow and think and work. Some of our customers are moving at a much faster pace than others, but we are running just as fast as they are.”

As a mid-market organisation, the MSP also looks to adopt a framework that has been tested on itself; as well as operationalised and learned internally.

“Every capability that will be part of this platform has been built on those foundations,” Zuppa said. “We are not experts in everything. We have partnered well and integrated platforms well.

“We are also learning and are probably only two to three months ahead of everyone else, especially those on the forefront of this. It is a fast-moving space.

“You’ve got to connect with the right partners, learn together and get those foundations right. That’s why I talk about foundations. Speed without foundations will only compound risk.”

Before organisations can become AI-ready, they first need to become operationally ready, Zuppa added.

“That means concentrating on key domain pillars around governance to ensure the right policies and processes are aligned to security, cyber security coverage, regulatory requirements and other obligations,” he said.

“You need visibility. You can’t protect what you can’t see. Organisations need visibility not only across traditional IT stacks but across this new and evolving landscape.”

Another key area is financial observability and measuring actual outcomes and experiences, particularly in the world of tokenomics and AI usage.

“You need that visibility and the ability to measure,” Zuppa added.

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