Conversation-driven automation redefines business processes by enabling natural language interactions between users and AI-powered systems, facilitating seamless communication and task execution. This innovative approach enhances user experience, boosts productivity, and fosters more intuitive and efficient workflows within organizations – and is the basis of Ephanti.
The startup
Meet Ephanti, the Silicon Valley based startup developing a cutting edge solution that delivers conversation driven business process automation, connecting people to applications in a seamless way through the use of AI, ML and NLP.
Founded just over a year ago, Ephanti has quickly grown to a 16-member team, with management based in San Francisco Bay area, and the development centre in Bangalore, India. In a short frame of time they developed their solution way past the proof of concept stage, successfully launching it to satisfied clients: from small businesses to enterprises.
The vision behind Ephanti is to produce high-impact, low-cost, easy to adapt digital innovations that help organizations create richer connections between their customers, teams and their systems. The goal is to reduce the number of tools they need to use to engage with consumers properly, by bringing it all into one solution, one unified launchpad.
Basically, a plug and play solution that simplifies business processes and easily connects different stakeholders through a conversational approach.
Sriram Sabesan, CEO, Ephanti
The origin
After decades of experience in the software industry, out of which 20 years in CRM companies like SAP, the founders of Ephanti got to knew the product inside out and noticed how recently CRM has become just a record of facts. On the other hand they noticed that businesses, from enterprises to small companies, are struggling with reaching and engaging their customers.
One of the things that constantly came up was the need for a solution that is nimble and quick to adapt, dynamic in nature so that businesses can change course quickly. However, despite the changes in the digital communication space, business models are still stuck in the old-fashioned “contact centre” way of doing business, creating a gap between software solution and customer engagement.
Detecting that sweet spot served as primary motivation in creating a conversation driven customer engagement solution for the Ephanti team. Sriram explains:
Driving the business process through the conversation is a natural thing to do, so there is no need to box it in a application with various logic that is hard to change. The conversational flow is an easier subject to change and that insight was the real motivation when we started out.
Initial reactions to this change in handling business processes were really positive and customers immediately felt that it is changing their outlook on how they can use these kind of tools compared to their past experiences.
Ephanti team, India
The solution
Ephanti’s single window solution unifies communication channels, social channels, automates responses from connected applications, assigns owners, adds human-in-the-loop for unresolved queries, moderates communication flow, curates information and more.
So far, through the implementation of the Ephanti solution, organizations have reported:
- 20% decrease in agent call volume and handling time
- 200% increase in unified customer engagement
- 22% increase in CSAT
- 25% faster business process automation
The solutions are industry specific and so far they have structured six of them: non-profit, hospitality, B2B, retail, healthcare and real estate. The size of the organization does not matter since the solution is created with small, medium and large businesses in mind.
The software enables businesses to reach out to thousands of people over clients’ channel and language of choice. Their self service feature, the Universal Action Centre, puts customers in charge, empowering them to put the flows into action as they want.
The Tribe
The backbone of the Universal Action Center is Infobip: messaging is the fundamental part of our product and that is what it provides consistently. Infobip is our go-to infrastructure to build our solutions on.
Sriram Sabesan, CEO, Ephanti
Since the beginning, Ephanti was looking for a dependable partner who will provide the infrastructure on top of which they will build their solutions and grow them hassle-free. After their primary vendor did not live up to its promises and left them without proper support, Ephanti decided to test other providers, including Infobip.
During the free trial they ran into some problems, and got a tremendous support instantly: as soon as they raised an issue, the Infobip team would reach out and help them fix issues. Seeing the quality of Infobip’s product offering and support, they decided to shift completely to the Infobip platform.
They soon joined the Infobip Startup Tribe program that granted them product credits they could use for free, which they, as a bootstrapped startup, appreciated immensely:
The product credits we were given as a member of the Infobip Startup Tribe team helped us try different variants and showcase to our customers which in turn helped our customers to believe in the technology and to believe in us. Infobip Startup Tribe program, the credits we got and the whole conversational API helped us elevate our solutions in a much faster time scale than we anticipated.
Sriram adds:
Since joining the Tribe we were able to accelerate our proof of concepts that we were working on with our customers. The whole conversational API and the ability to quickly integrate different channels was a game-changer and came in handy to speed up the process of convincing customers our solutions work.
Ephanti used additional Infobip Startup Tribe perks and joined the Infobip Shift conference in 2022 which they called a fabulous experience. They were provided with a booth in the startup expo area where they got to exhibit their solution, and even got coverage on national TV. They also participated in their first ever pitching competition.
The takeaway
The ride so far has been almost like a fairytale for Ephanti, with many crucial accomplishments under their belt in a short period of time. However, conscious of reality setting in sooner or later, they started working on plans that will help them endure it. They are expanding their industry focus, adding more use cases and are constantly researching newest technologies that are changing the customer engagement game. Their “always be upskilling our solution” mantra will serve them as they create a scalable model that serves their customers efficiently.
Clearly, Ephanti is on a trajectory of creating a world where every interaction matters, where businesses can stay consistently and relevantly connected to their consumers through one umbrella solution. And we are proud to provide them with the foundation that enables them to do that. 🤘
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