Customer Experience Market Has Huge Potential & Opportunity For Big Players: NovelVox's Amit Gandhi

When NovelVox started in 2008, there was no true Unified Agent Desktop. Lots of precious hours were spent by businesses in trying to serve a customer due to scattered data all over the application and agents had to struggle between 4-5 screens to handle one single call. Lot of repeat coding work was done by system integrator's building agent desktops.

Out-of-box agent desktops from telephony providers were not extendable whether a business is a hospital or a bank, both were offered the same desktop by telephony providers. They still live in one size fit all idealogy for all industries however needs are different.

Mostly all the agent desktops provided at that time were thick clients which had a very expensive maintenance task. Especially in the Middle East no agent desktops by providers were in Arabic, almost 90% of the agents were Arabic speakers and were using English desktops.

Amit Gandhi, Founder, NovelVox, realized potential in the market and got his initial team together to build an application called NovelVox Designer Studio. In an interview with BW Businessworld, he spoke about artificial intelligence, post-COVID world, competition, opportunity and more.

How have things changed post-COVID for a software development firm?
Things have changed a lot for good for a software firm. We could have never imagined working from home for months but we are working very smoothly from the comfort of our homes. Lots of travel time, carbon emissions have been saved. Product scalability and resiliency has also become one of the most important factors in the product consideration process.

Was there any strategy that worked well early in the business that isn’t useful in the post-COVID world?
In-person meetings may be. One-to-one business meetings or summits/events were a really important part of Goto Market strategy and developing business relations in the enterprise world but time has made that irrelevant in today's context. People have learned to do business even without it. Online meeting platforms have taken over and made you more productive.

How your products are solving customers/organization problems, so they can feel relief.
Companies use the most advanced tools to manage business operations and often times they are from different vendors. Most of these tools don't connect/integrate well with each other or have a basic integration which doesn't improve your overall productivity. Also, consumers have evolved from phone/text to social and instant messaging but when it comes to interacting with a company, they still have to rely on traditional channels.

We redefine their customer journey and optimize their performance with the advanced integrations, right omni-channel strategy and AI to offer more options to customers to get help across channel they want and when they want to connect to an agent, they already know everything about you to help you faster and take the experience with personalization to a next level.

AI is the most talked-about term these days, what is the future of it?
AI is already here. But will get real and mature once adopted at scale across industries. It's on its way from being a luxury to solve real-world problems.  AI is refining business processes to bring more efficiency and will be an integral part of any company's culture to find avenues to automate bringing competitive efficiency. It's allowing businesses to personalize the experience for their customers, partners and even employees in real time at scale. AI is becoming more useful with centralization data.

In Contact centers, AI is generally perceived as chatbots but that's just one part of it. AI is helping companies in predicting consumer behavior and helping companies improve their customer journey throughout their business cycle.

AI will only be going to make humans more efficient.

What are the market size, competition, and opportunity?
According to market research by a private agency, CX  (customer Experience) and contact centre market is $75B market with about 21% CAGR. With CX taking over price and product as key competitive differentiators, this market is huge and will continue to increase giving opportunity to big player and so the niche player too.