Today’s interview is with Antony Brydon who is the CEO and co-founder of Directly, a leader in customer support automation that works with enterprise companies to launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. Antony joins me today to talk about asynchronous messaging, conversational interfaces, AI and expert networks. This interview follows on from my recent interview – How your procurement team is impacting both your employee and customer experience – Interview with Todd Olson of Pendo – and is number 308 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Antony: For many years companies have tried to wean their customers off the phone, a very expensive support channel. But, customers kept sticking with the phone saying that is the channel that we’re used to that is the channel that we like. However, the phones that we now hold in our hands today are not really phones anymore they are asynchronous messaging devices. And, the dominant applications on those phones are text messaging and WhatsApp …