Ujet Inc. today upgraded its cloud contact center platform with intelligent virtual agent capabilities that the company says enable more natural interactions with customers.

The five-year-old company, which raised $55 million in venture funding in June, has a platform that combines voice and chat interaction with analytics to help customer service representatives engage more effectively with callers arriving via voice or text. The goal is to turn call centers from necessary evils into something that drives higher customer satisfaction.

“The customer support experience is uniformly pretty terrible,” said Chief Executive Anand Janefalkar. “Call centers have typically been a way to catch something that goes wrong or an afterthought.”

Ujet aims to change that with a multimodal platform that supports interactions by voice, web and mobile device and integrates with popular customer relationship management systems to give agents contextual information that improves customer engagement. The platform offers novel features such as the ability for a customer to send a photo directly to a designated agent and a dashboard that managers can use to assign agents automatically to queues based on activity.

The Ujet Virtual Agent uses natural language processing and behavioral analytics to determine the intent of a customer’s call and either resolves the issue automatically or transfers to a human agent. “This isn’t just a chatbot that looks in FAQs because the customer has often already looked there,” Janefalkar said.

The company says its intelligent routing technology is unique. It taps into real-time and historical data to route customer inquiries dynamically based on such factors as previous interactions with the customer or desired outcome. If an incoming contact is routed to human agent, the agent gets a contextual summary of the customer’s experience to that point as well as background information that can inform the interaction.

The system can factor in such elements as an incoming message’s IP address or the webpages the visitor has recently viewed to determine intent intelligently. It interprets answers to questions with natural language processing to determine the best response. “For example, if customer wants to add a spouse to an account, then a human is required and it will hand off to a human with no wasted time,” Janefalkar said.

Ujet also has a guaranteed-callback algorithm that calculates such factors as how much traffic the call center is experiencing, average call duration and agent availability to give callers an estimated time that an agent will call them, with 92% accuracy.

Interest in intelligent chat and voice response is high. Statista Inc. estimated that the global market for products and services related to natural language processing will grow from $3 billion in 2017 to $43 billion in 2025.

Photo: Photopin