Interview with Kanika Jain, Co-Founder and Product Lead, Squadstack

Artificial Intelligence is transforming customer engagement both in India and globally by enabling faster and personalised service. The use of chatbots or virtual assistants powered by AI allow the organization to respond to customer serviced inquiries much more effectively, while elective algorithms provide for workforce predictive analysis. Leveraging India's rich diversity and multilingual culture, AI can provide responses in different languages and may even have an understanding of the contextual circumstance—ultimately to support accessibility and enhance the overall experience. On a global scale, AI reduces costs, allows for better response times, and adds capability to scale when maintaining quality. By predicting needs and enabling proactive support, AI nurtures business relationships while enhancing customer engagement, thereby improving the customer experience overall.

There is an increasing demand for AI-powered customer engagement solutions which are driven by key trends such as the shift towards personalized experiences at scale, omnichannel communication, and proactive customer experience. Clients today are looking for AI that goes simply beyond being intelligent. Systems should be context-aware, understand nuances, and be deeply integrated into human workflows. Speed, precision, and personalization are the major concerns that should be dealt with and given importance. AI not only needs to provide rapid responses but also customize its activities as per the particular needs of the user to enhance the overall experience of the customers. Incorporating AI into the present workflows can enable businesses to have smoother and efficient processes and facilitate productivity and expansion.

Squadstack's new humanoid AI with human collaboration leverages the power of both AI and human agents in order to achieve personalized and cost-effective customer interactions. The AI can perform tasks such as data aggregation, simple inquiries, and lead qualification, allowing it to respond much quicker and maintain scalability. Meanwhile, human agents will execute tasks that require additional empathy, judgment, or human touch. This combination model enhances operating effectiveness and at the same time, gives customers the best of both worlds, automated responses and human experience when necessary. By merging AI with human workflows, Squadstack enhances customer service quality and speed, with adaptive and agile solutions versus traditional telecalling strategies.

Businesses come across several challenges in implementing AI-powered omnichannel customer care such as data silos, disconnected brand voice, and being unable to best enable the handoff between human agents and AI. These issues always create fragmented customer experiences delivered inefficiently, along with frustration. The silos are common when accessing customer data across channels, which causes a disconnect in experiences. Lack of a unified voice creates confusion and distrust, and handovers from bot to agent kill the flow of the customer experience.

Squadstack provides a solution by offering centralized workflows that allow for seamless integrating across channels. Sharing context in real-time allows brand experiences to be consistent and personalized so customer experiences feel the same, no matter the channel. Also, Squadstack’s human-in-the-loop provides for seamless AI-to-human handoffs with continuity, where agents step in for complicated issues. Taken together, it maximizes operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in a consistent, responsive, and personalized omnichannel experience.

As data security, protection and compliance have been the most commonly used words these days, it is important that Squadstack implements the highest level of data protection and regulatory compliance in AI interactions via a privacy-first architecture. Sensitive data flows are encrypted to protect customer data, and role-based access limits data access to approved staff only, reducing the chance of unauthorized exposure. Squadstack is fully compliant with global regulations, including GDPR and CCPA and rapidly changing India-centric frameworks to enable the processing of customer data in a best-in-class manner. This enterprise-grade security platform secures data and gives organizations a means to build trust, alleviate compliance risk, and keep AI-powered engagements fully on rails with compliance requirements. By putting data privacy and compliance first, Squadstack protects a secure platform for companies and clients, building trust in AI-driven experience.

The goal of emotionally intelligent AI is to transform the customer experience by stimulating conversations that transcend basic problem-solving. Strong tone analysis and sentiment marking will allow AI to determine a customer's emotional state and sentiment as they interact with it and will allow for a more empathetic reply. For instance, if the customer is frustrated or angry about a specific product, it could ease its tone and make it much more soothing, thereby calming the situation. Squadstack aims to build such capabilities into its solutions so that AI first understands the customer's emotional response and then makes the interaction more personalized and human-like. The emotional conversation could promote enhanced communication, diminish frustration, and lead to a better overall conversation.

Hyper-personalization and proactive engagement are critical in today's customer interactions by converting outreach from generic campaigns to engaging, conversational experiences. Personalized interactions extend beyond basic data to genuinely know the individual preferences, behavior, and needs of every consumer. At SquadStack, we leverage advanced AI to not only monitor and analyze user behavior but also anticipate their intentions with incredible accuracy. This allows us to present real-time, contextually appropriate messages and solutions in the exact place at the exact moment. This helps to make each touchpoint feel like a conversation rather than a pitch. Our AI-driven approach enables us to engage with users authentically and personally and form stronger connections and loyalty.

In the next 3–5 years, conversational and humanoid AI will reach a level where interactions are virtually indistinguishable from those with human agents both in tone, timing, and emotional depth. As natural language processing, emotional intelligence, and real-time learning all continue their pace of fast innovation, AI will be in a position to participate in conversation that is empathetic, aware of context, and highly customized. At SquadStack, we are leading this change by investing heavily in developing emotional nuance, enabling memory recall from prior conversations, and building continuous learning loops that allow our AI to learn and improve over time. These features not only make AI seem more human and promise every conversation will have meaning and relevance but also fundamentally change the way businesses engage with customers.

Squadstack's competitive strength is our ability to combine cutting-edge AI with actionable and result-oriented workflows. Most SaaS-based AI-empowered telecalling solutions can provide the same functionality, but our area of focus is using AI and driving actual outcomes. Our secret is the optimal blend of context, control, and conversion. Our context-rich insights help us understand customer needs at a deeper level and offer the right message to the right set of audience. Our precise control over workflows enables us to optimize every interaction and make it more impactful. This approach ensures that we just don’t engage with the consumers but also drive meaningful conversations, making the AI-powered telecalling effective and smarter than others in the market.

Being the co-founder of Squadstack, my vision is to create technology that is human-centric, not AI-centric. AI is part of the solution, but initiating the innovation and tailoring the customer care is the human element. To take our technology global, we would aim to create adaptive and scalable human-centric solutions that could be tailored for various geographies and users. We aim to continuously refine and enhance our technology, improve emotional intelligence and make adaptive workflows, ensuring that every interaction seems to be meaningful and is able to cater to the queries of its customers and keep on fostering the relationship of its target audience.