From operational excellence to building man machine interfaces; Samith Ramachandran narrates Uniphore’s sagacity

The vogue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) is steering the global speech recognition commerce. The AI-based voice recognition is widely used in the automotive and the healthcare industry. Uniphore Software Systems serves as provider of Speech Recognition solutions for enterprises and has worked with over 70 enterprise customers and served over 4 million end users. Analytics Insight spoke to Samith Ramachandran, Vice President and Head of Products at Uniphore Software Systems to get a comprehensive knowledge of the company, its functioning, strategies and product it has to offer in market and how trends of Big Data-AI/ML patting the industry.   Analytics Insight: Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers. Samith Ramachandran: Uniphore Software Systems is a global Conversational AI technology company that builds transformational customer engagement solutions for businesses. Uniphore offers software for Conversational Analytics, Conversational Assistant and Conversational Security. Uniphore has served over 100 enterprise clients and 4 million end users. It has offices worldwide including in USA, Singapore and India. Uniphore was founded in 2008 at IIT Madras, India. The company was recognized as a Technology Fast 500 company in Asia Pacific by Deloitte in 2014 and ranked 10th in Deloitte’s Fast 50 in 2015. Uniphore’s Co-founder & CEO, Umesh Sachdev, was named in 2016 as one of the ’10 Millennials Changing the World’ by TIME Magazine, and ‘Innovators Under 35′ by MIT Technology Review. Uniphore’s investors include John Chambers, IDG Ventures India, IIFL, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Ray Stata, YourNest Angel Fund and India Angel Network. Our solutions include: auMina, Speech Analytics Solution auMina is the conversational analytics solution designed exclusively for speech data analysis and customer behavior prediction. It is powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities. It helps enterprises to categorize and work on differing customer needs by deciphering the customer interaction patterns in a recorded call. Call centers and customer relations offices can benefit vastly from these analytical data to enhance their delivery and service. It helps the enterprise to track their employees as well and help them learn, seal gaps and attain optimum customer satisfaction. Akeira, Conversational Assistant Uniphore’s conversational Assistant software is an intuitive artificial intelligence for enterprises. Akeira interacts with contextual dialogue to consumers and handles unstructured queries as well. It provides support for about 100 global languages and more than 150 dialects. It is an easy means out of the monotonous IVR processes and is available 24×7. amVoice, Conversational Security Voice Biometrics ushers in the state-of-the-art technology to ensure the security of online transactions. It uses an individual’s unique voice-prints to create a biometric voice lock, unique to the user like a fingerprint. It does not require the sharing of sensitive data and decreases the time needed to complete the transactions.   Analytics Insight: Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of the Big Data Analytics and its future.           Samith Ramachandran: Big Data Analytics (BDA) in a traditional sense dealt mostly with structured Enterprise data and post-facto analytics use-cases. This led to massive Data lakes which is now going through testing times to see how much actionable insights can be generated. A relatively newer trend and the future in BDA is dealing with unstructured (text, speech, image, video) and real-time data. BDA in the future will feed new emerging areas of AI namely, IoT, Hyper Personalization, Augmented Reality, Behavioral Analytics and Graph Analytics. As we look into the future, we can definitely bank on Big Data Analytics to drive a lot of new and innovative AI applications.   Analytics Insight: Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it Samith Ramachandran: We primarily offer Conversational AI solutions to our customers in three different areas: •   Conversational Analytics to help Enterprises extract valuable business and customer insights from their contact center conversations and help improve customer retention, sales, collections, call center performance etc. •   Conversational Assistants who can take over simple to moderately complex tasks away from Contact Center Agents. The solution can help the Agents by giving real-time solutions as the call progresses with the customers, helping them perform their job better. •   Conversational Security to bolster and simplify user authentication and identification instead of using complex and intrusive authentication and other biometrics. With our suite of solutions, we are primarily focused on generating business value and redefining customer experience for enterprises.   Analytics Insight: How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through adoption of the company’s technology innovations? Samith Ramachandran: If I have to specifically talk about case studies, we have deployed our solutions to drive multitude of business goals ranging from improving agent performance, improving customer retention, improving sales conversion, improving collections performance, optimizing call center operations etc. To exemplify, let us take the collections or sales scenario, we can analyse every single call and provide insights to enterprises on what is working well and what is not, thereby equipping the enterprise to change the agent scripts, tweak internal processes, training etc. in accordance with the insights provided to improve sales conversion or collections performance.   Analytics Insight: Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go to market strategy for the same? Samith Ramachandran: We are versatile when it comes to industries. We have worked with customers across verticals namely, Telecoms, BFSI, Healthcare, Hospitality, BPO, FMCG etc. The largest adoption we see is currently in the BFSI sector. Our solutions are designed and built to solve real business problems and goals. Our GTM strategy revolves around this point supported by our robust platform which employs best of breed tech providing the widest language coverage, advanced analytics and visualization capabilities. A do-it-yourself (DIY) inspired configuration engine and pre-built analytics packs aimed at solving the most common and relevant business problems also helps us serve the enterprises better.   Analytics Insight: Would you like to highlight a few use cases where analytics has benefitted the organization tremendously?      Samith Ramachandran: I have mentioned some of it in the earlier questions. If I have to talk about some recent cases, we have use-cases with some of our BFSI clients where we have been able to deliver an improved sales and collections performance based on the analytics and insights from our solution. We have other use cases where our real-time analytics is delivering significant operational efficiency in contact centers thereby freeing up more human agent time to either take more calls or deliver better and superior customer experience.   Analytics Insight: How C-suite executives can leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations? Samith Ramachandran: C-suite executives across verticals are now looking more and more into innovative data platforms for extracting the next big idea for their businesses. While traditional analytics does well with structured data, the unstructured data analytics space is very fragmented with vendors who do social media, text, email, chat analytics, which is another important aspect in understanding your customers and their journey. While CRMs capture some level of information, it lacks the ability to derive critical behavioral information such as customer persona, preferences, recent interaction or sentiment trends etc. You need the right platform to bring all customer interactions together and enable an enterprise to analyze the customer’s journey and experiences across all platforms.   Analytics Insight: What are the key trends driving the growth in Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning?  Samith Ramachandran: Continuing from the earliest question the trends driving growth in BDA/AI/ML is now mostly driven to process and analyze human conversations, interactions and to decipher human behavior in general to build better man machine interfaces. More than just predictive analytics the focus is to create better cognitive analytics capabilities.