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What is the most significant change COVID19 has brought about in the contact centre landscape and is it here to stay? 

The changes brought about COVID19 are going to linger on for a long. What COVID has done is accelerate the pace of consumption and adoption of technologies like conversational AI. Pre-pandemic, contact centres comprised of a brick and mortar building with agents armed with desktops and who followed processes stringently. COVID19 has impacted this setup, and the BPM industry in an unprecedented manner. Agents have shifted to WFH overnight. In the first three months of the pandemic, the industry was dealing with the transition and changes that WFH brought about. When this mode became Business as Usual (BAU), there was tangible enablement in conversational service automation brought upon by AI. We have worked with some of the biggest names in BPM to take these changes to quality automation, assisting agents in the start, middle and end of conversations with customers and more. We're glad we could bring automation to contact centre processes with layers of NLP/NLU, ML, DL, video and voice technology and RPA, and enhancing customer experience. And we believe this change is here to stay. It is estimated that 40% of agents will continue working from home; the resilience and pace of tech adoption demonstrated in the past year and half will prepare them better for any future challenges.  

How are technologies like AI and analytics changing the contact centres today? 

The application of AI in contact centres are manifold. The idea is to leverage these technologies to work as a co-pilot to a human agent in realtime and augment the nature of a customer interaction. AI has the capability to provide intelligent, self-servicd options to customers. Earlier, if we were to call a toll-free number, we would have to press several buttons to progress to the next level of interactions. As these conversations become complex, automated systems find it harder to keep up with the customer's queries and eventually, the call gets transferred to a human agent. What we do at Uniphore with AI tools is to bring together the core elements of customer interactions seamlessly, enable customers to seek information in any language they choose. As the interaction with a customer gets more complex, the conversations are being constantly monitored and analysed. As the conversation progresses to an agent, a smart assistant, upon understanding the conversations, provides vital inputs like notifications on cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, compliance, sentiment analysis, collections improvement, updates to be sent to supervisors. The AI can also aid with the summarisation of the call, and overall providing productivity gains by nearly 80%. But we don't believe entire interactions will be led by machines, instead, what we will see is a seamless integration of machines and humans talking to one another. 

Uniphore acquired RPA Technology in Oct '20, and Emotion Research Lab in Jan '21. What is the significance of these acquisitions?

These investments can take us way ahead of our industry peers. The acquisition of Emotion Research Lab is mainly to strengthen our video AI offering. The acqusition of NTT Data's RPA technology was to complete the offering of video, voice and RPA, while being supported by a robust AI platform. These acquisitions were especially critical to our growth last year owing to the sudden change in the nature of interactions with partners and customers alike. With video and voice being the carriers of interactions, the all powerful voice and video capabilities can be further supported by RPA. The addition to facial emotion recogntion software will help the use of AI, DL and automation to analyse, extract and make recommendations based on realtime data, using individual expressions through voice, video. This way, we can really understand the true emotions of customers. It will spur use cases beyond the customer experience industry, expanding into more than 15 critical functions like sales, HR and marketing. 

How have customer preferences evolved in this industry, and how are companies like Uniphore poised to better serve these clients than conventional service providers? 

Three years ago, the industry was discussing the introduction of conventional analytics into contact centres. Today, we're in a different space where we're actually enabling these agents with AI capabiilities. The world has moved fast, and the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of adoption. We work with Tech Mahindra, WNS, Firstsource and Sitel. These companies were looking at introducting multiple efficiencies in their existing legacy systems, and we recognised that their systems were not robust enough to carry advanced AI capabilities efficiently. Large service companies ideally want a company that can usher in massive changes but with legacy systems in place. Earlier, contact centres would see calls get transferred but there would be little clarity if customer complaints got resolved - today, you have systems in place, powered by tech like RPA, that delivers reminders to agents. Supervisors get realtime notifications on the progress of calls and if they have to jump in to address these queries. Agents would not update call notes in the most optimal manner but systems now ensure uniformity. These tangible changes are helping service companies cater to their customers better. Now, several studies reveal that BPM players that don't adopt technologies like AI will be under pressure to continue business. 

With marquee investors on your board like John Chambers and a new CFO Stephane Berthier, what direction do you hope Uniphore will go in the near future? 

We're forward thinking about product, platform and business strategy. With board members like John Chambers (of CISCO), Andrea Ayers (of Convergys) and Burt Podbere (of Crowdstrike) we have access to the best minds in the business, who can enables us to timely decisions with speed. With our latest Series D funding of $140 million, we want to expand our AI platform capabilities. We're already present in 13 countries and are looking to expand over the next two years. We have a little over 300 people globally and will double our headcount in the next year. Eventually, we want to become the one-stop shop for AI architecture for any enterprise. 

Also Read: Disrupting the multi-billion dollar contact centre industry with voice