Uniphore Pioneers Human and Machine Unification: The 2021 CRM Conversation Starters
Uniphore has been in business since 2008, but for much of that time, it operated mostly in India. Then in December 2019 it opened a U.S. office in Palo Alto, Calif., and the company has been seeing tremendous company and customer momentum ever since. An office in Singapore is also providing a base for expansion into Southeast Asia.
A conversational artificial intelligence technology company, Uniphore sells software for conversational analytics, conversational assistance, and conversational security. Its vision is to disrupt an outdated customer service model by bridging the gap between human and machine using voice, AI, and automation, and it acted on that desire this year with its acquisition of Jacada, a customer experience and contact center automation solutions provider, in late July. Combined with Jacada’s low-code/no-code platform, Uniphore’s conversational automation platform will empower businesses to automate key interactions across self-service and agent-assisted customer engagements.
The deal followed Uniphore’s acquisition in January of Emotion Research Lab, a company that uses AI and machine learning to identify emotion and engagement levels in real-time video interactions. Emotion Research Lab’s software uses advanced facial emotion recognition and eye tracking to capture and analyze interactions over video in real time. It can be used to detect facial and eye movement, facial expressions, attention span, and other factors.
When combined with Uniphore’s Conversational Service Automation (CSA) solutions, which understand, analyze, and automate voice conversations in real time, Emotion Research Lab’s video-focused AI capabilities will open up new use cases, including customer experience, sales, marketing, HR, and others.
Among Uniphore’s product launches this year were the U-Trust portfolio and U-Assist Assurance solution. Both solutions are focused on improving and optimizing contact center interactions from start to finish, strengthening the connection between front-end customer experience and back-end fulfillment through robotic process automation (RPA), and improving contact center security through agent verification and data security.
U-Assist Assurance uses RPA technology to track promises and commitments made by agents in real time, align expectations with the customer immediately following the call, and manage fulfillment post-call.
The U-Trust portfolio, meanwhile, includes two distinct solutions: U-Trust Agent, a verification solution that uses a unique voiceprint to authenticate agents, and U-Trust Environment, which protects sensitive customer data. U-Trust Agent verifies agents in real time using voiceprints continuously through the entire agent shift. U-Trust Environment builds on agent verification to offer a greater layer of security for sensitive customer information by ensuring that agents cannot see or hear sensitive customer data during calls.
And in July, it added even more AI capabilities to U-Assist, giving it interaction sectioning, intent detection, informed supervisor alerts, and after-call work.
“A better customer experience comes when people and technology work together. Our end goal is to optimize every conversation and improve both the customer and agent experience. With these additions to our portfolio, Uniphore is delivering on its mission and directly addressing the critical needs of call center agents, businesses, and consumers,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and cofounder of Uniphore, in a statement.
“Uniphore takes a unique approach to the market, combining speech analytics, conversational AI, voice biometrics, and agent assist tools into a single conversational service automation platform,” says Ian Jacobs, vice president and research director at Forrester Research. “Uniphore also has native language models for languages that are usually left behind, such as Vietnamese, Bahasa, and Tamil.”