Artificial intelligence undoubtedly has taken the world by storm. It has transformed how the organized are used to perform business earlier. AI has not only altered the way of business. It has also changed the customers' perception and their expectations regarding a brand. AI is relentlessly touching human's lives. Let's say, virtual assistants such as Alexa and Cortana that respond to people's queries, read news, schedule meeting, etc. While business decision-makers and disruptors are racing to reach the potential of AI to gain a competitive edge, the technology is already advancing diverse industries ranging from healthcare, finance to manufacturing with new products and capabilities.

In an exclusive interview with Analytics Insight, Chaitanya Chokkareddy, CIO, Ozonetel, shares insights into how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the industry and catering to the company's development and growth.

AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of Ozonetel's products and services?

AI is now at the core of Ozonetel's cloud communication solutions. On the one hand, AI is being used to analyze contact center conversations via real-time speech analytics. On the other hand, it is being used to drive self-service and better agent responses via intelligent chatbots, conversational IVR, and smart agent assistance.

How has Covid increased the adoption of digital channels and automation within various sectors' communications?

To begin with, Covid has accelerated the movement of call centers to the cloud. The few enterprises that were still using legacy systems have either switched to pure-cloud or hybrid solutions. It enables easy integration of any new digital channel into their call center. It also allows easy integration with other business tools such as CRM that makes it possible to automate callbacks, automated responses to lead forms, and more. According to our studies, the pandemic has increased customer impatience. Callers are far more likely to abandon calls even when placed on wait for far shorter times than before. This, along with an increased need for customer communication, has necessitated the use of digital channels and self-service IVR, amongst other measures to mitigate call loads.

How Ozonetel's advanced AI enablement will transform the cloud contact center space?

Ozonetel's AI enablement will make it easy for businesses to deliver a superior customer experience at scale. Firstly, L1 queries will be handled by self-service and bot systems, which will mean faster responses to simple queries and lesser wait times for customers who need to connect with a human agent. Secondly, agent training will become easier and faster with speech analytics and AI-based agent assistants. Thirdly, a single AI deployment that can be used across multiple voices and chat channels could triple interaction capabilities leading to considerably lower cost per contact for businesses. Finally, contact center data can now be mined for useful insights that help customer experience, marketing, and product development teams.

Can you elaborate on the growing importance of voice bots in customer support?

Voice bots, just like chatbots, will essentially help reduce L1 queries and tasks via self-service, bookings, cancellations, verification calls, appointment reminders, and other proactive customer support and engagement tasks. In India, multilingual voice bots will have special significance for regional support.

How does Ozonetel's rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?  

Ozonetel has been providing call center solutions for over a decade. We have a deep understanding of the kind of issues that matter most to call centers. We have worked with enterprises to build custom reports required to meet and manage large-scale communication demands. We have the training data required to create accurate AI-based bots for almost every industry vertical across multiple languages.

What does Ozonetel's technology and business roadmap look for the rest of the year (2021 – 2022)? 

For this year, we will be concentrating on making inroads into the US and Europe.