Now that customers demand more from their transactional experiences than ever before, businesses are forced to think more carefully about how they deliver service. Transformative technology like artificial intelligence and automation are being built on the back of crucial data analytics. These solutions are beginning to pave the way for a new kind of customer experience strategy.
Virsae is a cloud communications company that allows businesses around the world to monitor and manage their services in a more comprehensive way. Virsae believes that in 2019, the adoption of AI and automation will skyrocket, leading the way to self-healing systems and proactive solutions. Virsae's ability to harvest billions of pieces of data in the cloud using their Data Lake Technology stack means that they're already gaining insights on a global scale which they can deliver to their customers in a variety of ways.
We spoke to COO, Ross Williams about how Virsae has evolved to support the new CX journey.
Tell Us About Virsae and Where it Came From?
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Ross Williams[/caption]
Ross Williams is the COO of Virsae. He's been with the business right from the start, and he told me that it's not the first company that him and his co-founders began. "In the beginning, we were software developers who created a piece of software that worked for Avaya platforms in the 90s. We discovered a market for softphone integration and developed our solution into a toolkit which eventually became Contact Centre Express."
Williams' company quickly caught the attention of Avaya, who purchased the business in 2009. After that, the founders of Virsae started looking for new ways to transform the communication environment. We noticed that UC managers were struggling to manage the IT in their UC environments. They couldn't find and fix problems with ease or see into the solutions they were using."
Although the need for service management has always been around in the communication space, it fell to Virsae to make a solution accessible to IT teams. "We have profound roots in service management. We simply decided that it was time to bring the IT service management framework into the communication environment, to improve insights and reduce management overhead."
Where Did the Big Data and AI Strategy Come From?
Recently, Virsae launched a new 45-point system health check for UC companies that examines everything from customer experience to availability. Using hundreds of millions of pieces of data collected from calls each month, the Virsae AI engine can pinpoint issues that humans simply can't see on their own. I was interested to find out where the path to AI began for Virsae.
Williams told me that Virsae made some critical decisions early on that laid the groundwork for their AI solution. "We decided to write from the cloud early on, as we thought it would be better and easier for both our customers and us. We made this decision right out of the gate, and it helped us to build this environment where we can deliver services to anywhere with an internet connection."
The billions of conversations that Virsae analyses each year go to the same central database, meaning that they have a fantastic environment through which they can access useful insights. Applying AI to the business simply meant that Virsae could continue to deliver incredible and actionable solutions to their customers.
