Next gen users will grow up with AI and automation, voice and NLP: Uniphore

Uniphore has always been good at harnessing the power of the human voice. It is using AI to solve a frontier problem for the world; bridging the gap between people and machines using speech and our voice to help ensure so that every person can be heard. The future of customer service is conversational service automation.

Here, Annie Shea Weckesser, Chief Marketing and People Officer, Uniphore, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you dealing with the Covid-19 situation? What plans have you put in place?

Annie Shea Weckesser: At Uniphore, we have a People First policy. Our top priority and concern are our people’s safety and well-being, including employees, customers and partners. Because our business is global, and as one of our co-founders is based in Singapore, we started to see signs of the pandemic, first in Asia and started to track the situation back in late January.

No matter their location, Uniphore employees are urged to follow all the recommended guidelines issued by WHO, CDC and local authorities to help protect against the spread of the virus.

Back in February, we began restricting travel and in March, we instituted remote working for all our employees globally. As we rolled this out, we shared a policy and manager guide on working remotely including suggestions with how to manage their teams. We also re-examined our meeting frequency. We switched our all-hands company meetings from quarterly to monthly, and other regular meetings to daily or weekly, to ensure that we stay connected. Additionally, managers work in close coordination with their respective teams in order to stay abreast of all the activities being undertaken. This is not limited to work alone, but more importantly, the health and well-being of our teams.

In March, we also shared the Business Continuity Plans with each of our customers. Despite the current limitations with travel due to the pandemic, we continue to be 100% focused on our customers and through technology and a responsive team, we continue to deliver world-class support.

DQ: Are you giving employees more control over their schedules?

Annie Shea Weckesser: We trust our employees implicitly. We have always had checks and balances to keep projects on track, whether working from home or remotely. We regularly share time management tips and encourage them to take regular breaks from their working hours as well. To break up the week, we have organized activities such as team meditation, yoga, painting nights and happy hours, all done across video.

Moreover, being a company with a global presence and teams, we do our best to respect time zone challenges and encourage our employees to balance their regular working hours to be sensitive when scheduling meetings as to the working hours of teammates.

DQ: How are you assessing learnings from enforced experiments around WFH?

Annie Shea Weckesser: We have created five ‘war rooms’ with different objectives. It all boils down to having a greater understanding during this pandemic, of the pain points of our employees and our customers. One of these war rooms is about the health and well-being of our employees.

During times of anxiety, it is especially important to keep employees informed about what’s happening with the company and also keep them up to date on the resources that can help them stay calm and productive. In this group, each leader in the company, supported by others, will be responsible for the complete needs of every employee and their families, while also addressing our current customer needs. This includes rolling out unique programs to offer support of our employees and customers during this challenging time.

Another group is responsible for growth. As a company that’s growing at a fast clip, we see a tremendous market opportunity because contact centers need us more now than ever and so we are responding to this growth factor. A third war room, as you would expect, is focused on examining the financial scenarios to ensure that we save costs and spend prudently during this time.

DQ: This is a challenging time for managers. What advice would you give them?

Annie Shea Weckesser: The first thing is to ensure that they feel supported in their roles and that they feel like we are one team, centered on our culture. We have a very strong company culture that permeates the entire organization, both for employees and managers, and the fact that we build from that gives managers a sense of unity and support.

Every company needs to assess their own environment and take constructive steps to support managers. We have tried to learn from what other companies have done and what has worked for us, may be instructive to other companies.

Considering that we have a geographically dispersed workforce, we are being over communicative with our teams and we ensure we speak to them individually on a daily or at the very minimum, on a weekly basis.

We have tremendous talent and we encourage colleagues with different set of priorities to report back to us more frequently. We want them to feel as if they are in a normal working environment and take on decisions, as they would do in their conventional office set up. We have regular sessions and workshops for our managers who are on different levels to analyze their execution processes and stress points.

DQ: How does work/life balance work in a crisis like this?

Annie Shea Weckesse: There is no such thing as balance – it is about integration. The space between work and life has crashed quickly into one. Earlier in my career, if I worked a day from home, I would try to keep the two, separate. Now, with working from home for extended periods, this is not possible nor is it a reality. People are facing challenges managing their personal life at the same time as work. Empathy has never been more important. It is a journey where we are all in it together.

For instance, our co-founder and CEO – Umesh Sachdev has started to do virtual gatherings on Thursday’s. We bond with our team over their drink of choice and talk about everything but work. These are tough times and when we come out of this, we will have deeper connections with one another. The functions or leadership does not divide our employees. It is all about being connected with everyone around you to enhance relationships.

DQ: What are the policy responses you would give to the MSMEs and SMEs?

Annie Shea Weckesser: MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) are more affected in such a scenario. It is definitely testing times for them, and they need to look deeper and be more resourceful and inspired. It is an opportunity to build their capabilities and emerge stronger. During this time, we have launched LinkedIn Learning to keep our employees learning and growing. It is important to be transparent with our teams and customers to help them engage with the company goals and objectives.

DQ: How are you now facilitating digital work?

Annie Shea Weckesser: We are utilizing all of the enterprise collaboration tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce and others. There are many positive technological changes that will come out of this crisis. Complete digitization of companies is what the future holds and it is going to be a normal way of working.

DQ: How are the latest technologies going to redefine workplace?

Annie Shea Weckesser: For the last 20 to 30 years, we have not had a major technology disruption in some key areas impacting business. We've seen some disruption in business models when call centers, started to become offshore, in locations across Asia, India, and Mexico.

Our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence and automation, natural language processing, speech recognition and availability in over 100 languages, Conversational Service Automation (CSA) is one such technology that is going to be a very critical aspect for the customer service industry. It is a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us in the future. The next generation of users will grow up with AI and automation, voice and NLP, all around them.

A recent report by a top analyst firm reveals that up to 30% customer service representatives would be working remotely by 2023. Based on our discussion with customers, we know that this shift has accelerated and most of the workers will never return to the office. Now, when the workforce is remote, you need tools to reimagine what the call center of the future should look like, and to monitor compliance, agent authentication, and provide automation.

Uniphore has a product called akeira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. In essence, Conversational Service Automation can be a real boon for the contact service industry in such stressful times.

DQ: How do you plan for a future of ‘digiwork’?

Annie Shea Weckesser: The future of ‘digiwork’ will be improved by the lesson’s we are learning from the struggles we are facing today. We are preparing to return to office-based work, but when restrictions are lifted, we will be thoughtful in how we determine the primary work locations. In some parts of the world, some of our employees may not return to the office full time.

Culture and communications are cornerstones for us at Uniphore. Technology will be the backbone to understand our people and customers and to transform the use of Conversational AI. With safety and well-being of our employees being top priority, regular communication through digital tools help us in building on our culture. It is all about how you interface with your employees, customers and measure growth and innovation simultaneously. It is about the ability to maintain current revenue streams and develop new ones.