 Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space. I think it's grown up over a number of years as it originally I think was some acquired companies and now they got a huge setup here. And we had a big day today talking about customer experience. And really, if you look at the Comcast voice remote and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the coverage. You don't really give Comcast credit for it but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest. She's Annie Weckesser. She's the CMO of Unifor. Annie, welcome. Yeah, thank you for having me here today. Absolutely. So what is Unifor for people that aren't familiar with the company? So Unifor is a global leader in conversational service automation. And our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine through voice, AI and automation. It's a mouthful. Yes. Conversational. Service. Service. Yes. So people talking. You guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? Yep. Well, primarily our focus is call centers. So large enterprises who have massive call centers where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customer's voice and solve the problems in a faster manner. So I don't have to repeat my account number of six different times to six different agents. Right. You've gotten an IVR cycle or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't, the person on the phone who picks it up, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. So it's pretty interesting because there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML but really where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. What kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion? Yep. Well to the first part of your question, the company started at IAT Madras back in 2008 and originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice. Voice being the lowest common denominator in India where the languages are 260 potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realized that customer service was a large market and somewhere we could have a big impact. Right, right. So you recognize you said 100 different languages? 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chat bot or a voice bot to get their issue solved. And then you integrate in with whatever the core system is that the customer service agents are using. Yes. So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call center agent gets by using your guy's service? Yeah. So think about it as a platform where the customer can help their agents be more effective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a healthcare client, they said would it be great if we could automate that completely? So we've taken the after call work for one customer or client taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it can correct it if needed and it's completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more of calls and help other customers or it can get them off the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening in to provide suggestions. It's actually taking it to the next level in terms of what category is categorizing, what type of call, the outcomes, et cetera. It's actually quite interesting because oftentimes less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between one and 10% of calls are listened to in call center. So we can listen to 100% of those calls. In addition, we offer something called that's more along the lines of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer and our technology will serve you up coaching mechanisms in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of an agent. Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back in and do the analytics and have a text-based search so you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into the ether. You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and machine learning technology there. So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer-centric culture in your own company. Not only just enabling it, but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective which is the customer. Yep, I think it really starts at the top, right? It starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO who's extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact, it's our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about when you're bringing a new technology and you're inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and you're saying, hey, this is actually a better way to keep texting transactions and we actually have a really cool coach that can help kind of guide the people. How do you help move customers to a place that they don't necessarily know they want to go? Yeah, I mean, you find that a lot, right? It's not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today, but it's having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future-proof. So that's critical. I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today, but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. Right. I'm just curious too, in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right? So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls. Everything is tracked to the minute and it's funny they had a demo with Westworld and Westworld's funny because we started treating machines like, or treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people. And sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies, is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful? Is it enabling them to have more time to get to better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as, oh my gosh, you're just trying to jam four more calls in my hour by taking care of my two minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call. Do you think about those things in the end customer? The time is really the premium, right? So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting off the phone. I think that's the most effective way of doing it. Just final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice because I don't think people are really completely tuned in. Certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with text or not necessarily available with other types of channels? Yeah, I mean, I see it most easily in my children. They expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room, they everywhere we go where they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So I mean, that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customer's voice, however they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. Right, really cool story, Annie and thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing it with us. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. All right, she's Annie. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation Day here at the Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.