In the Future of Voice AI series of interviews, I ask three questions to my guests:
- What problems do you currently see in Enterprise Voice AI?
- How does your company solve these problems?
- What solutions do you envision in the next 5 years?This episode’s guest is Neil Hammerton, CEO & Co-Founder at Natterbox.
Neil Hammerton is CEO of Natterbox. Neil co-founded the UK telecoms disrupter in 2010 with the aim of transforming the business telephony experience of firms and their customers. Today, Natterbox works with over 250 businesses around the world to improve data integration through CRM within Salesforce. Natterbox enables them to put the telephone at the heart of their customer services strategy and guarantee high standards across their customer services experience.
Natterbox is the AI-powered contact center platform redefining how Salesforce-first businesses connect with customers. Drawing on 15+ years of contact center expertise, we help leading organizations to effortlessly incorporate AI into their contact center operations and seamlessly blend AI with their contact center workforce to deliver optimal customer experiences.
Recap Video
Takeaways
Deep CRM-native integration beats bolt-ons because it keeps full context across every call and channel.
Real-time summaries turn each call into structured data the next agent or bot can use on the spot.
Recording and transcribing every call is the foundation for smart routing, compliance, and coaching.
AI should own the simple, high-volume tasks while humans handle exceptions and emotion.
The biggest CX drag is “tell me your story again”; carry context forward and it disappears.
Wait times drop fastest when AI does first response and triage before a human ever picks up.
Let bots update Salesforce during the call so agents don’t burn time on after-call work.
Building your own telephony stack gives control over quality, latency, and feature pace.
Measure success by resolution and customer effort, not just bot containment or call deflection.
Most customers won’t dig through a website; they call—meet them with fast, guided answers.
AI without a clean handoff path back to humans will frustrate users and spike churn.
Automate the top three intents end-to-end first, prove value, then expand the surface area.
Use history plus live intent to route to the right bot or human in seconds, not minutes.
Keep transcripts and actions inside Salesforce so data is secure, searchable, and actionable.
Voice is still the highest-stakes channel; small gains here move CSAT, FCR, and churn in a big way.
Offload repetitive calls to AI and agents get happier, faster, and more effective.
“AI first, human-in-the-loop” is the practical path for the next 12–24 months—not full automation.
The win isn’t flashy AI; it’s consistent outcomes: faster answers, fewer transfers, better follow-through.
