Interview by Renato Pasquini, Research and Consulting Director at Frost & Sullivan
Renato: Jorge, can you please describe what your role is for our readers?
Jorge: As managing director for the Enterprise BU for Latin America, I am responsible for developing and managing the business growth plan for the Latin America region, including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Andean Region, Southern Cone and Brazil. I am the primary point of contact for field sales personnel and I support them to help our clients to find ways to better engage with customers, leveraging the latest AI technology while achieving company revenue and sales goals. I help to develop a trusted advisor relationship with key accounts, customer stakeholders and executive sponsors while I am also in charge of the region’s revenue forecast and tracking key account metrics.
Renato: What do you want to accomplish in the next couple of years?
Jorge: One of my goals for Latin America is to ensure it is recognized as the growing region it is and promote internally and externally how advanced the region is in deploying world-class technology to assist customers.
Renato: How would you describe what Nuance is today and its mission?
Jorge: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nuance) is a pioneer and leader in conversational AI and other innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. We deliver solutions that can understand, analyze and respond to human language to increase productivity and amplify human intelligence. With decades of domain and artificial intelligence expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations—within the telecommunications, financial services, retail, healthcare and automotive industries—to create stronger relationships and better experiences for their customers and workforce.
Nuance Enterprise enables Fortune 500 brands to engage with consumers in the omnichannel world, delivering seamless customer experience and delivering higher revenue and lower costs for the brands. We are perfectly positioned to help our customers to win through intelligent customer engagement solutions powered by AI.
Renato: How is the company supporting its clients to cope with digital consumers?
Jorge: Nuance supports their clients by ensuring a solution can be deployed in many channels; we call it “Design Once, Deploy Many.” Market-leading brands usually start their digital transformation journey with one vendor for, let’s say, virtual agents (VA) deployment, but then they have to go through difficult integrations and deployment nightmares when they are in need to add live chat or voice biometrics to enhance their customer experience (CX). Well, that is not the case with Nuance portfolio, as any company can start with one of our offerings and easily expand into other areas, seamlessly leveraging the power of AI and our omnichannel platform.
Our platform enables automated and assisted engagements, meaning it possesses the ability to decide which type of engagement would be the best in a given situation. Our Targeting Engine analyzes all available data in real-time. For example, it will monitor the journey of a given customer in a website, including the monetary value of its buying cart, etc., and will suggest the right solution at the right time. This is very important, especially when dealing with VIP or angry customers, as you will probably want to have them speaking to a live agent rather than a virtual assistant.
Renato: In your view, what are the key trends that stand out in the customer experience market in Latin America?
Jorge: Key trends are the use of natural language and voice recognition for authentication, security and routing. The region is beginning to adopt, very rapidly, the use of biometrics and routing technologies to better support their customers.
In the digital arena, Latin America is also awakening to live chat and is realizing there is more to it than just chatbots, viewing it only as part of a bigger picture in supporting a customer.
Renato: Considering the current status of digital transformation in Latin America, what are some of the challenges Nuance and its clients are facing and what strategy is in place to overcome those?
Jorge: Let me share what we have been seeing lately:
- Organizations want to find ways to provide best-in-class support in a personalized and scalable way, expanding focus in emerging channels like messaging without losing sight of investments in the traditional phone channel.
- Organizations are seeking more “do-it-yourself” (DIY) tools without losing customization options. Organizations want to be able to easily manage/update technology deployments but still require high-touch service to ensure success.
- Integration of multiple channels. Organizations want to be able to maintain context across channels, consolidating data to be able to provide predictive measures and personalized services.
Renato: Your company states that “it is reinventing the relationship between people and technology.” How is it doing that? What is implied within that message?
Jorge: We deliver solutions that can understand, analyze and respond to human language to increase productivity and amplify human intelligence. Nuance allows companies to leverage our technology and have more natural conversations with their customers.
Renato: As a general conclusion, what do you think the future of the customer interactions will look like? More specifically, what role can we expect Nuance to play in shaping this future?
Jorge: It will be a voice-everywhere world. We are living in a world where you can talk to virtually everything—from our cars to smart speakers to our TVs. And in the future, smart kiosks and ATMs. And pretty soon, navigating even the slickest apps and websites will feel slow and difficult compared to just talking. And the rise of consumer voice assistants is a huge deal for enterprises, even if it may not seem like it yet.
There are new ways to use the power of voice to engage organizations—for questions, ordering products, checking delivery dates—all of which boost customer satisfaction and demand. Nuance’s decades of innovation in speech, natural language and conversational AI have resulted in human-like interactions and omnichannel engagements that integrate voice and transform the customer journey into an experience they love. Conversational AI allows consumers to engage in natural interactions through speech, as well as text, to gain immediate access to information and easy, effortless outcomes through IVR, messaging or web channels.
This voice-everywhere world is forcing organizations of all sizes to re-think not just WHERE voice is used in their customer service, but also HOW it works. Many enterprises are already leveraging voice and conversational AI in their customer engagements and are getting ready for when customers use voice for everything, including playing songs, ordering pizza or changing a channel on the TV.
Customers are already calling out; whenever organizations become ready to answer the customer’s voice, then it will truly be a voice-everywhere world.
Renato: Jorge, great. Thank you. Great discussion!
