We see AI as the bed rock of our digital transformation: Ashwin Chalapathy, Uniphore
Enterprises today are faced with a significant amount of challenges in their contact centres leading to poor customer experience e.g high average time in Queue, poor first call resolution, high handle times, agent skills etc. and this impacts all key customer facing processes such as sales, marketing, support and collections. And it is exactly these customer facing processes that are being transformed through the application of Conversational AI, opines Ashwin Chalapathy, Managing Director, India and Sr. Vice President – Services, JAPAC, Uniphore
1. What are some of the key processes in which you are using AI?
AI is being widely deployed across many industry segments to transform their processes. Amongst the many applications of AI one sub-set called “Conversational AI” focuses on enabling software to understand interact with people naturally using speech or text. Conversational AI has huge ramifications in terms of impacting the customer service industry especially when enhanced customer experience is being seen as a key competitive advantage. A large number of conversations between customers and enterprises happen through customer service centres (contact centres) and clearly higher quality of conversations lead to higher customer satisfaction. Enterprises today are faced with a significant amount of challenges in their contact centres leading to poor customer experience e.g high average time in Queue, poor first call resolution, high handle times, agent skills etc. and this impacts all key customer facing processes such as sales, marketing, support and collections. And it is exactly these customer facing processes that are being transformed through the application of Conversational AI. Human call centre agents are being augmented by virtual chat bots, virtual voice agents which have the ability to understand the customers needs and help provide an appropriate response or solution to take away the load from human agents and allow them to focus on more complex tasks.
2. What have been the key benefits?
Significantly improved customer experience would be a key benefit through
• Improves customer experience by reducing wait times, faster resolution times etc..
• Freeing up skilled human agents to address tasks which require more complex skills
• Providing real time intelligence and support to human agents to enhance the quality of responses
In addition there would be benefits in terms of reduced costs, higher efficiencies, increased revenues etc..
3. How critical is AI in the digital journey of your firm?
“Enhancing the customer experience” is a key tenant of any digital journey and this cannot be accomplished without leveraging the capabilities of AI. In a world where instant gratification is a mantra, application of AI is helping reduce customer wait times, quicker resolutions, speedier access to information etc. and thereby reducing the frustration levels and stress significantly
4. What have you been able to do today that would not have been possible without using AI?
As part of the digital journey we felt that focussing on enhancing customer experience and getting our customers to feel and touch the new age technology of AI would help position us an innovator with compassion and we therefore decided to launch the mobile virtual assistant which is a one stop shop for all customer interactions and provides a seamless experience from discovery, engagement and support of the services we offer
5. Evolution of AI in your firm – do you see AI handling more complex processes now or in the future?
We see AI as the bed rock of our digital transformation and with the evolution of the technology we hope to widen the application of AI across our enterprise processes
