TechBytes With Ritesh Idnani, President Of Business Process Services, Tech Mahindra

About Me

Please tell us about the role you handle and how you arrived at TechMahindra

I’ve been working in technology and technology-enabled business services for over two decades across IT services, BPO, SaaS/ BPaaS, outsourced product development, engineering research and development, and automation/ cognitive computing businesses. Prior to Tech Mahindra, I’ve held various senior executive leadership roles at large tech-focused organizations. At Tech Mahindra, I drive our business process services organization, digital experience and software products and platforms businesses globally.

Why did you choose Uniphore to drive IT innovations at Tech Mahindra?

Customer experience has been front and center in our business philosophy for years. We are constantly looking for ways to increase automation and deliver great business outcomes – and part of adhering to these principles includes partnering with technology leaders in the space. What Uniphorehas to offer from a technology standpointis clearly a great fit for our partner ecosystem. We felt that the team would be a strong strategic partner for us in the contact center space.

What are the core foundations of your partnership with Uniphore?

The foundation of our partnership with Uniphore is the desire to create a superior customer experience from start to finish, while reducing the cost of operations at the same time. This foundation is supported by the key components of Uniphore’s offering that led us to partner with them in the first place. Uniphore’s platform leverages automation, AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to reduce costs, automate processes and improve customer satisfaction. These ultimately come together to improve the customer experience for the agent, for the consumer and for businesses.  This becomes especially valuable when coupled with Tech Mahindra’s industry defining Business and Technology Transformation capabilities which we consistently deploy for our customers. We excel at evaluating a process, function, or business across multiple parameters and make holistic recommendations and then implement the same, and we are confident that Uniphore is a perfect solution to address some of the key elements of such transformation.

How do you intend to leverage Conversational AI for your various enterprise tasks and workflows?

We have a lot of existing customers that are all at different stages in their digital transformation journey. What we’re looking to do is bring Uniphore into the mix to bring more mature conversational AI and automation capabilities to all of our customers. We also want to integrate Uniphore’s technology into our own solution so that we can offer it as a package deal when onboarding new customers and really help bring that maturity and technical sophistication right away.

About Persona and Technology Insight

What is Tech Mahindra’s objective in 2021, with regard to delivering Customer Experience?

The keys to our objectives in 2021 are flexibility and accelerating digital transformation. The world around us continues to change rapidly and COVID-19 has been a catalyst for digital transformation. In 2021 and beyond, we want to really be a partner to all of our enterprise clients as they navigate through the changes brought on by the pandemic as it continues to evolve and embrace the different technology shifts that will contribute to a better customer experience. As long as we continue to partner closely with our customers and make them relevant to their end users, we think we will continue to lead in this space.  What is also noteworthy is that we believe that the Uniphore solution coupled with Tech Mahindra’s expertise in this field will continue to define the market even after this pandemic subsides.

How does Conversational AI, CRM and Call analytics help to achieve best in class CX management?

Conversational AI, CRM and call analytics are critical to building a superior CX management program. They help personalize the experience and provide the humans on the business side with more insights into the customer. This fosters better interactions with the consumer, which in turn improves customer satisfaction. Automation, particularly with tasks like after call work (ACW) and automation of Quality Audits with deep actionable insights, also helps businesses identify process inefficiencies and implement internal changes to eliminate them. The power of AI and NLP is that is improves these businesses bottom lines without sacrificing the customer experience in the process.

Which industries have benefited the most from your Digital Transformation and CX Management solutions?

So far, the early adopters of these technologies are telecom, banking and financial services and retail. They’ve clearly been at the forefront of leveraging AI and automation in their businesses to drive digital transformation. I would expect that insurance, utilities and healthcare will be the next wave of businesses that adopt these technologies more broadly.

Hear it from the pro: How do you see the role of AI and Machine Learning evolving in CX Management in the COVID-19 era.

AI and ML are must have’s for CX management in the COVID-19 era and will continue to dominate beyond this disruptive event. In addition to helping alleviate the challenges of shifting to a WFH model and the highly variable business conditions that were paramount to survival at the start of the pandemic, I expect that we’ll start to see companies expanding their use of these technologies to more predictive use cases. They’re starting to move from playing defense against the pandemic to playing offense and predicting things like next best offer for a consumer who might churn or other areas that will help actually earn additional revenue.

Thank you for answering all our questions!