Market Perspectives

In recent years, organizations have leaned into automation as a way to improve customer service operations. Automation in any process is a key stepping-stone to a higher level of efficiency needed to help balance the high costs of mass personalized service against its revenue benefits. One of the key players in this space is Uniphore, a software vendor specializing in service automation.

Since 2020, the contact center industry has experienced a widespread trend to accelerate digital transformation projects with an eye toward injecting more intelligence into processes like self-service and agent guidance. Ventana Research asserts that through 2025, organizations will work to define and optimize automated workflows for customer experience. This will tie front- and back-office workers together and enhance the service experience. Uniphore has taken advantage of this trend by developing an automation engine that uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language processing and speech analytics to make customer interactions more conversational and versatile.

Uniphore's X Platform contains four core applications for the contact center: Self Serve, Assist, Analyze and Capture. The company also provides a conversational intelligence tool – Q for Sales – that specifically targets sales groups.

Analyze leverages AI-powered speech analytics to pore over customer interactions, extracting valuable insights and identifying areas for improvement. The platform allows organizations to monitor customer sentiment, evaluate agent performance and uncover hidden trends. This helps planners and managers make data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience.

Uniphore's Self-Serve application employs AI and NLP for intelligent voice and chatbot interactions. By automating routine customer inquiries and providing personalized support, organizations can potentially reduce response times, increase first-contact resolution rates and optimize the overall customer service experience.

The Assist module focuses on boosting agent performance and productivity through real-time guidance and workflow automation. The platform provides agents with contextually relevant information on how to deal with situations, allowing them to quickly become subject matter experts through AI-powered recommendations and unified content.

Finally, Uniphore Capture is the enterprise recording platform that ingests real-time conversational data, enabling organizations to draw insights from it. Capture is not a required part of the complete platform as it pulls the data from an organization’s voice systems such as those built by Genesys, Cisco or Avaya.

Since its acquisition of Jacada in 2021, Uniphore has focused on X-Designer, its low-code/no-code environment. X-Designer adds significant depth to Uniphore’s own development resources and to its expertise in the agent desktop process integration stack. Pushing automation creation out to workers without coding or development skills reduces the time it takes to design workflows to what are often relatively straightforward problems. It also reduces the need for dedicated IT resources when workers most closely tied to processes have a hand in designing and deploying automation.

Uniphore continues to make acquisitions to enhance the capabilities of its platform. In February 2023, Uniphore announced the acquisition of France-based Hexagone, a provider of conversational AI-derived insights. Also in February, Uniphore announced the acquisition of U.K.-based Red Box for voice, screen and metadata capture.

Uniphore has established itself as a major player in the service automation market. The company's strategic partnerships and expanding global footprint have further strengthened its position in the marketplace, attracting customers across various industries such as banking, retail, healthcare and telecommunications. Buyers looking to make their operations more efficient should take note of the company’s innovative product line and commitment to improvement through both acquisition and organic development.