A group of investors just gave a $38 million vote of confidence in Conversational Service Automation. That is the total value of two tranches of a Series C financing round in Uniphore Software Systems. Uniphore was founded in 2008 to provide cloud-based speech processing and speech analytics based solutions to enterprise customers.

In the ensuing years, in addition to raising nearly $60 million from investors, Uniphore augmented its offering in response to market demand, integrating “real-time” analytics, machine learning and voice biometrics into a platform for Conversational Service Automation. Its solutions have proven their value by rapidly recognizing and understanding a customer’s intent, surfacing business insights that inform product development, marketing efforts and overall investment decisions.

CSA: Leveraging Prior Investment in Digital Transformation

Uniphore’s valuation is based on ambitious revenue targets and are being borne out as companies recognize that Conversational Service Automation represents a bonafide component of any coherent investment plans for Digital Transformation. It augments and leverages prior investments in back office systems aimed at improving employee productivity. Conversational Service Automation’s biggest impact, however, is on customer-facing resources that support live agents as well as conversational intelligent assistants that are staples on e-commerce Web sites, speech enabled IVRs and intelligent speakers.

Companies around the world are poised to spend billions or, by some estimates, trillions of dollars to infuse their business operations and customer care fabric with largely undefined elements of “artificial intelligence” (AI). IDC recently forecasted worldwide spending on AI to reach $35.8 billion in 2019, an increase of 44.0% over the amount spent in 2018. That sum pales when compared to a forecast generated by a different group at IDC that observes a rush by businesses of all sizes toward “Digital Transformation” (DX) to the tune of a mind-bending $6 trillion over the next four years.

The Transformational Troika

This spending takes place under a set of assumptions taken as cyber gospel. First, customer care infrastructure (including contact centers, CRM and Web content) is moving off premises and into “The Cloud.” Second, The Cloud is where “Big Data and Analytics” can live up to its true potential because voluminous amounts of personal data can be subjected to deep neural network-based predictive analytics and understanding. Which gets us to the third element of the transformative troika: AI – specifically, natural language processing, machine learning and cognition can be applied to make agents more productive and support better self-service across multiple devices, channels and communications modalities.

The result is better targeting of promotional messages, predictive treatment of incoming communications and highly-personalized service. Customer Engagement Management, Customer Journey Management and Orchestration are the terms many used to describe this model of customer interaction. The underlying assumption is that data and analytics foster a better customer experience.

Conversations Will Prevail as the Preferred Engagement Model

But how about this? Rather than framing the challenge as constant surveillance of the customer journey to support predictive analytics and rapid response across all media, why not just listen better and foster better conversations when an individual decides to touch base with customer care personnel or resources? Treating interactions with customers and prospects as “conversations”, rather than “engagements” fosters a better customer experience. It starts with better listening and real-time analytics of what is heard.

Uniphore is helping to define a category or cluster of services that define Conversational Service Automation. As conversational engagement models establish themselves as the preferred ways for customers to get in touch with the companies they prefer, Opus Research expects spending on such services to be on a par with Robotic Process Automation, now a distant cousin of CSA that shares the objective of making employees more productive and customers more satisfied by automating the repetitive, non-creative tasks that take time and tend to annoy people.

We have the technology!

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