Uniphore, an early market leader in the Conversational Service Automation (CSA) space, announced today that it acquired an exclusive third party license for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology from NTT DATA to drive innovation, quicken time-to-market and deliver intelligent front office automation for modern contact centers.
This technology deal is one of many components of the global strategic alliance announced earlier between the two companies that deliver solutions to transform the $470 billion dollar customer service market. NTT DATA will continue to own this software and sell RPA services for contact centers.
Uniphore plans to integrate this RPA technology with its CSA platform to develop first-of-its-kind capabilities that automate the front office. By combining unattended and attended RPA capabilities along with Uniphore’s AI and machine learning capabilities, Uniphore’s engineers are developing industry first solutions for both existing and new use cases. Enterprise organizations will now be able to rapidly scale customer service operations, reduce operating costs, boost agent productivity and satisfaction while providing an entirely new, conversational, “hold-free” and “error-free” customer experience.
While specific terms of the deal will not be disclosed, the RPA solution Uniphore now has delivers the capability to design, build, deploy and integrate attended and unattended RPA bots with its Conversational Service Automation platform. Having RPA capabilities built-in and part of the larger solution means the individual modules don’t need to be managed separately, saving time and money.
These capabilities will open new opportunities to address key vertical markets that currently struggle with ongoing, repetitive, large-volume and mundane tasks. Equipped with technology that can quickly and effectively reduce or in many cases, eliminate low-value, error-prone people-based actions, human agents will be able to focus on and deliver more value-added services. Additionally, these new capabilities enable organizations to establish more accurate and reliable follow up after customers engage with them through the contact center.
“Over the past several years, Uniphore has been delivering market-leading capabilities which automate important processes and leverage AI to solve the problems of large customer service environments,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore. “With RPA modules now part of our innovation engine, we will rapidly expand our offerings, which will transform the customer service market and virtually eliminate the costly and frustrating experience of being put on hold.”
“In today’s business environment, automation has become essential to survival. When automation happens, it frees up people to focus on innovation and ingenuity,” said Tanvir Khan, Executive Vice President, Dynamic Workplace Services & Business Process Outsourcing, NTT DATA Services. “We see this deal with Uniphore as a win-win because new solutions will enable our agents to be more effective on the front lines while helping organizations accelerate their digital transformation and ultimately deliver new customer experiences.”
“By adding RPA technology to their innovation engine, Uniphore is in a leadership position and capturing the next market transition in the voice sector. No other company has the breadth and depth of Uniphore in terms of real-time AI solutions, intelligent automation capabilities, machine learning expertise, and geographic reach,” said John Chambers, former Executive Chairman and CEO of Cisco and current founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures, an early backer of Uniphore. “By integrating these technologies, Uniphore will become an even more powerful partner as enterprises continue to accelerate their customer service digital transformation initiatives. Congratulations to Umesh and the entire Uniphore team on this transformative announcement!”
Contact Centers see strong results when optimizing back office and front office automation. One Uniphore customer has seen a 20% reduction in call handling times and has saved over $6 million by leveraging a smart mix of AI and automation capabilities.
