Sourabh Gupta is the CEO and Co-founder of Skit.ai, an augmented voice intelligence platform designed to empower contact centers to manage customer inquiries more efficiently. In this interview with TechBullion, Sourabh Gupta will be telling us more about Skit.ai and his vision for the business.
Please tell us more about yourself?
My name is Sourabh Gupta, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Skit.ai, an augmented voice intelligence platform designed to empower contact centers to manage customer inquiries more efficiently.
From left to right, Akshay Deshraj, Co-founder and CTO, Sourabh Gupta, Co-founder and CEO.
What is Skit, tell us about the company, and what inspired the Skit business?
Skit.ai is the leading voice AI SaaS provider offering an augmented voice intelligence platform that helps businesses modernize their contact centers and customer experience by automating and improving voice communications at scale.
I founded Skit.ai with Akshay Deshraj, my colleague and the company’s CTO, in 2016 right after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Our vision in creating the company is to elevate customer experiences and lay the groundwork for the future of voice interactions.
We believe live voice conversations are critical for providing high-quality customer experience, across industries. When businesses want to deliver the best voice experience through their contact centers, they would need a platform built from the ground up to understand human conversations. The human/machine partnership is the future of intelligent work, and we enable companies to implement this in their contact centers.
Who is Skit for, what unique solutions and services do you provide that makes you different from other voice platforms?
We created Skit.ai for enterprises across the globe that want to improve the way they handle customer conversations in their contact centers.
We wanted to help companies overcome CX problems such as long wait times, and provide more personalized and consistent brand experiences at scale.
Skit.ai’s vision is a world in which our Digital Voice Agents resolve tier 1 customer service issues, and automate cognitively routine work while human agents can focus on more complex customer problems.
We are a purpose-built voice AI platform, with models trained on spoken language—not text, or read-out phrases—with domain-specific knowledge feeding speech recognition layer, so we can solve problems that are unique to every business.
What problems were contact centers facing before Skit’s contact center modernization and what lead to the rise of voice AI?
The problems plaguing the contact center industry do not need much by way of introduction. A few examples include:
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- Frustrated customers due to dropped calls, long wait times, inefficient conversations, etc.
- A lack of automated technology.
- Faulty AI bots.
- Minimal agent productivity and more.
Modern customers expect not just a way out of these problems, but also empathic and personalized interactions when they communicate with a brand. It has become imperative to invest in a purpose-built solution to handle human voice conversations, for any brand that wants to provide the best experience in every voice touchpoint.
The emphasis here is on being a solution built specifically for voice, as imperfect speech recognition contributes to a high word error rate (WER), which could potentially lead to upsetting customer interactions, posing a major challenge to companies hoping to build rapport and increase retention rates. The Skit Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform makes the most out of every customer interaction, boosting brand loyalty and contributing to customer retention.
Could you give us a walkthrough of the Skit voice AI product ecosystem and how it works?
The Skit Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform is designed with industry-leading speech recognition and synthesis engines and is designed for better customization and control.
The enterprise-ready stack provides high levels of agility and scalability, with a library of pre-built machine learning building blocks and out-of-the-box integrations to enable us reduce time to value for our customers.
We build powerful Digital Voice Agents that sit on top of the existing telephony system and plug seamlessly into contact centers, hold conversations with customers and automatically perform tasks such as intelligent transfers and callbacks, and on-call assistance for filling out forms or making payments.
Though we primarily offer voice agents, we integrate with other channels to meet the needs of the end-users.
Ability to seamlessly pass on and fetch data and context from other channels to deliver top of the class customer experience. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves in case of channel transfer.
Ability to send Email / SMS / text messages by integrating with existing channels to provide end-to-end resolution.
Visual Call Assist handhold end-users in completing a journey on a web interface in a self-serve manner. E.g. using VCA we can collect documents right on the call itself.
Agent Assist capability that powers live call transfers to human agents when necessary with full conversation context
With chat and voice bots becoming more prevalent/popular across customer service industries, what’s the future of conversational voice AI and the industry as a whole?
There are numerous predictions about the future of conversational voice AI, but my top three are:
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- AI will enhance existing products, ultimately maximizing productivity by improving accuracy and simplifying existing processes.
- AI will create thousands of new types of jobs. For example, the Skit Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform helps automate non-productive calls, which in turn creates more time and opportunities for human agents to focus on different business aspects.
- AI systems’ use cases will pave the way for more nuanced engines that elevate our understanding of businesses, customers, processes, and so much more.
At what stage of development is the Skit voice AI platform and what is next on your roadmap?
This year, I relocated from India to NYC to build our U.S. presence and shape the company’s development as we navigate a new hyper-growth phase.
Regarding what’s next for the company, we are actively working on our proprietary Automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech engines, to further cement our role as the leading global voice AI SaaS company. Additionally, from a product perspective, we are continuing the development of our proprietary telephony, which is successfully augmenting our calling capabilities multifold.
Any available opportunities and partnerships on the Skit project?
Nothing to share at this time, but we’re looking forward to continuing our current U.S. partnerships and creating new partnerships in the months to come.
Do you provide any ongoing resources and support for Skit customers/users?
Yes, we do. We have dedicated Delivery & Customer Success teams assigned to customers to implement and support use cases throughout the customer journey, catering to the client’s defined success metrics. For more complex tech issues, we loop in the Solutions team and ML Engineers.
On Voice AI and Skit, do you have more information to share with our readers today?
For every brand jostling to capture market share, delivering superior CX is a differentiator. Being available 24/7, understanding customer intent, and engaging with them intelligently in real-time will help build stronger relationships.
Voice AI can catalyze the above, while significantly improving business performance, and optimizing operational costs.
Even outside of customer service queries, Voice AI can help accelerate sales cycles, improve payment recovery rates, and support a number of instances that impact business growth.
Skit.ai is aimed at impacting not only CX but also contact center employee experience and business outcomes, helping businesses develop a competitive edge.
For more information, visit the website: Skit.ai
