​​​​​​​AI has brought paradigm shift to contact centres: Ozonetel’s Atul Sharma

Ozonetel launched contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) in the India in 2010 and now provides omni-channel contact centre services to businesses of all sizes. Over 200,000 call centre agents in 2,500 enterprises use Ozonetel’s platform for servicing 10 million calls per day across India, the US, South East Asia, and the Middle East. The company recently had a shuffle in its top leadership, with Atul Sharma, co-founder, taking over the charge of chief executive officer (CEO) from the earlier chief technology officer post. TechCircle spoke to Sharma about the company’s evolving tech strategy, future plans, and expansion to new markets. Edited excerpts:

Ozonetel raised Series A funding of $5 million in 2021 after ‘intentionally’ staying bootstrapped for a long time. Can you provide any colour on upcoming fund raising or expansion plans?

We intend to raise the next round of funding by the end of the year. We are in the process. In terms of expansion, we are planning to expand to other markets, especially in the US where we already have partners. More headcount expansion will happen alongside our evolving operations in India and the US, in particular.

How has the evolving technology landscape changed the way you operate? What are the new consequential challenges that have emerged?

When we started in 2010, we managed the entire infrastructure out of physical data centres, which was a challenge since we spread across multiple markets. With cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure making an entry, we were able to offer an ‘as-a-service’ model. This also created increased awareness and emphasis on data security with companies being very apprehensive about having data on the cloud. Over time, the attitude has changed and we have reached a comfortable spot now.

Currently, artificial intelligence is the flavour of the season, even though our work on this technology began five years back. The infrastructure cost then, for instance, that of GPUs, was much higher, hindering the scope of innovation. With time, the technology has evolved and so has the cost.

How are you leveraging AI to better CCaaS?

Collecting customer data, analysing the call records, and other similar tasks were done manually, based on simple queries. With AI on the horizon, these processes have become smoother and more efficient. With features like call summarisation and speech transcriptions, it is easy for us to understand the customer experience with better accuracy. There has been an entire paradigm shift — contact centre agents can better analyse customer needs better which is driving most of the customer intelligence. 

Ozonetel launched ChatGPT integration into contact centres in May this year. How has that helped improve customer experience?

Contact centre agents were earlier depended on static systems for services customer query servicing. With ChatGPT in the picture, we have been able to gain deep insights from across our data and create a knowledge base. This knowledge base has helped them have much deeper query resolution conversations with the customers. This also takes away from the stress of training these agents as they become more self-sufficient.

Ozonetel’s ChatGPT-enabled contact centres also eliminate random sampling and manual errors. Every single call can be monitored in contact centres as compared to random sampling of 2%-5% before and results are available quickly.

Apart from AI, what are the other technologies that you are excited about?

The core of transformation at Ozonetel remains AI, and we keep adding layers going ahead. Improving customer experience remains the vision and we are now looking at improving it in real-time. 

We are now working on a low code-no code customer journey designer. This solution helps build and define your customer journey across channels. All the intelligence is built into it. Omnichannels can support multiple channels but problem arises when different strategy has to be designed for each channel. This project that we are working on will not only support different channels but will also support their unique definitions and strategies. All the data which is collected across the channels will be used to come up with customer insight.