Uniphore Looks to Strengthen Agent & Customer ExperiencesUniphore Looks to Strengthen Agent & Customer Experiences

Conversational AI provider Uniphore last week updated its portfolio with an aim of better supporting call center agents and operations, as well as building trust between consumers and agents and improving the overall experience.

The first offering, U-Assist Assurance, builds off of Uniphore’s conversational service automation (CSA) technology, which combines conversational and data analytics, voice bots, IVR systems, security, robotic process automation (RPA), and customer feedback history in real-time to optimize human-to-machine and human-to-human conversations, as Umesh Sachdev, Uniphore co-founder and CEO, described in a company blog. For the RPA component, Uniphore has integrated the RPA technology it acquired from NTT Data in October 2020. U-Assist Assurance is the first RPA-driven application from Uniphore, Sachdev told me in a briefing.

U-Assist Assurance is meant to automate processes associated with tracking, logging, and following up on deliverables discussed during a customer engagement, Uniphore said. Specifically, “it tracks promises and commitments made by agents in real-time during the call, aligns expectations with the customer immediately following the call, and manages fulfillment post-call,” the company described in its press announcement.

For example, should a contact center receive a call from a customer about an overcharge, U-Assist Assurance would pick up on that word and automatically pull up the bill for the agent to review, Sachdev described. “You have a request, and it’s done in a matter of seconds,” he added, noting that without the CSA and RPA capabilities, the agent would need to place that call on hold and manually retrieve the customer’s record.

The second offering is U-Trust, a portfolio comprising agent verification technology called U-Trust Agent and, on top of that, a security layer called U-Trust Environment. The U-Trust portfolio addresses the security concerns associated with remote agents working outside of the traditional, secure contact center, Uniphore said. With these products, Uniphore aims to offer enterprises the ability to assure customers that the agents they’re speaking with are trained and experienced, and that sensitive data is not accessible to agents.

As Mary Wardley, program VP, customer care and CRM, at IDC, said in a prepared statement, “While the vast majority of agents are trustworthy professionals who are proud of their role in supporting customers with integrity — work-from-home poses new risks to organizations, the agent staff and the customers they serve.”

U-Trust Agent eliminates fraud and ID issues in real-time by authenticating an agent’s identity using voiceprints. This verification takes place continuously through the entire shift, Uniphore said. U-Trust Environment adds in the data protection piece, ensuring that agents can’t see or hear sensitive customer information shared during a call, Uniphore said.

U-Trust Agent is available today. U-Assist Assurance and U-Trust Environment will follow in the second half of 2021.