Exclusive Interview with Bhaskar Mishra, Head of Product, Mihup

Voice AI Technology has been around for a while and the smartphone revolution has turned it into a ubiquitous phenomenon. The shift towards voice AI and voice technology can be attributed to the comfort levels it offers to users. Younger generations, particularly millennials, enjoy the freedom and control AI voice assistants provide when going about their daily tasks. Mihup Communications Pvt Ltd is a leading Voice AI platform that is enabling enterprise developers to create automated voice interfaces with full control over brand identity and privacy. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Bhaskar Mishra, Head of Product, Mihup

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Mihup Communications Pvt Ltd is a leading Voice AI platform founded in 2016. Mihup is enabling enterprise developers to create automated voice interfaces with full control over brand identity and privacy. The company has two major products:

Mihup VIA (Virtual Interaction Analyst) –Mihup VIA is a cutting-edge solution that has the capability of 100% customer interaction analysis across calls, emails, and chats. This holistic system enables businesses to gain insights that help them significantly improve sales, collections, and overall customer experience. Last year, we have launched the VIA 2.0 which has additional feature sets. The solution is packaged as an easily navigable product with customizable parameter settings. The output is made available in the form of analytical dashboards with graphs and numbers to give a clear picture of customer interactions of the day alongside trends and predictions.

Using the VIA 2.0 enables analysis and scoring of each conversation, and performing agent evaluation and scoring. The advanced AI platform can boost revenues by over 10% and save costs on escalations and repeat calls by up to 60%. It can also boost the efficiency of agents and quality analysts by 3x if regularly and holistically adopted by a contact center.

Mihup AVA (Automated Virtual Agent)–Mihup AVA is a customer interaction platform for automated and accurate handling of customer queries through conversations with a human-sounding virtual agent to improve customer experience. Mihup has also customized the AVA for usage in passenger and commercial vehicles, and it offers control of in-vehicle functions like entertainment and media simply by following natural voice commands.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Mihup is on a mission to make technology inclusive and accessible to all irrespective of the language, accent, or dialect. The company is transforming the conversational AI landscape through its platform that works seamlessly on edge devices and low-connectivity environments. The platform has proved to be ideal for use cases such as in-vehicle smart assistants, customer call analysis, or media and entertainment support. Mihup's products are being used in industries like media and entertainment, consumer electronics, IoT, retail and e-commerce, automobile, BFSI, and other industries. The platform has already handled over 100 million conversations and brought about an unprecedented efficiency in the call center operations for various clients. The service is currently available in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and a mix of these with Indian English.

3. Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

Mihup is transforming operational efficiency and customer experience through innovative conversational AI solutions for various sectors such as media and entertainment, consumer electronics, IoT, retail and e-commerce, automobile, BFSI, and other industries. Mihup leverages a proprietary platform powered by the speech-to-text engine, natural language processor, dialogue manager, and text to speech, and it guarantees superior accuracy even when mixed languages are spoken.

4. How can businesses efficiently extract the value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

The majority of the businesses fail to extract the true value of data available to them due to its segregation into silos depending upon the source. Second, the analytics process is mostly manual, resulting in the evaluation of only a fraction of it. For instance, in contact centers, the manual QA processes lead to an analysis of no more than 3% to 5% of the call data available, leaving the other 95% to 97% of data providing no value addition. Additionally, the manual QA data is highly subjective. This is where automation of the analytics process through solutions such as Mihup's conversational AI proves to be the game-changer. The platform can seamlessly synchronize different data sources and consistently ensure 100% conversational data analysis. Similar enhancement of data analytics processes can lead to superior outcomes for business decision-makers, sales and marketing efforts and in most other verticals in a cost-efficient and simplified manner.

5. How can C-suite executives leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations?

Usage of data analytics solutions provides the C-suite decision-makers with a holistic view of all the information stored across the organization. For instance, analytics enables the sales teams to better comprehend the trends, consumer sentiments, and market predictions through data-driven insights. They can plan sales strategies, create new marketing campaigns, undertake competition analysis, improve products and services, etc. The CEOs can use all the data-driven insights to create as well as fine-tune the company's operational strategies and plans. Through the integration of AI analytics, decision-making becomes transparent, faster, fact-based, and can be much more beneficial to their organizations.

6. What are the concerns that organizations have before using Analytics?

Conventionally, organizations hesitate in switching over to the AI analytics technologies due to concerns such as infrastructure needs, and limitations of the system.

There is usually a humongous volume of data coming in from different sources. Manually storing, qualifying, and undertaking analytics on this data can be overwhelming. Even if analytics is attempted, it is not always easy for companies to understand and share a visual representation of the insights and facts. Mihup is aiming to change this perspective.

Organizations need to go through Change Management. When data is exposed, it may bring surprises, some may find it difficult to interpret data. Mihup VIA organizes data that can be easily consumed. The well-laid-out dashboards are easy to consume and stories are understood at a glance. It doesn't require Business Analytics skills and customized alerts.

7. What skill sets do you specifically look for while hiring them at an initial stage?

We are strong proponents of thought diversity, and while hiring new talent, a lot of emphasis is given to the ability to express and come out with novel ideas and the zeal to execute them. Mihup has a great company culture and our people practices and the work environment are highly valued. Thus, while hiring people, a lot of attention is given to the 'cultural fit and the interpersonal skills. We aim to grow as a company that achieves business objectives and fulfills the employees' aspirations.