Kuljesh Puri is the Senior Vice President and Common Supervisor of Communications, Media & Expertise at Persistent Methods. He brings over 26 years of expertise throughout the software program, telecom, and semiconductor industries, together with in depth worldwide publicity and a ardour for transformation.
Earlier than becoming a member of Persistent, Kuljesh headed the Telecom Product Engineering portfolio at Tech Mahindra. Earlier than that he labored at Harman Worldwide, a Samsung firm, as Vice President and International Common Supervisor for the Telecom and Industrial verticals, mandated with defining a progress trajectory for the enterprise. Earlier, Kuljesh spent 15 years in senior enterprise and engineering roles at Aricent in each the B2B and B2C companies.
Persistent Methods is a worldwide digital engineering and enterprise modernization firm that companions with companies to drive innovation and speed up digital transformation. With deep experience in software program, cloud, and information, Persistent delivers end-to-end options throughout industries, together with healthcare, monetary companies, communications, and know-how.
What are essentially the most transformative methods you see AI impacting name heart operations in telecom and media at the moment?
Historically, contact facilities have been value facilities designed to deal with buyer queries. Through the years, from phone-based name facilities, consumer service has advanced into multi-channel service facilities via chat, emails, and cellular apps. Key improvements like seamless omnichannel experiences, AI-driven multilingual self-service, sentiment evaluation, and predictive churn administration are not non-obligatory—they’re important. On the identical time, Agentic AI is remodeling contact facilities into consumer expertise facilities by absolutely dealing with end-to-end duties like billing corrections, plan upgrades, or technical troubleshooting with out human intervention, going past scripted chatbots. General, AI is enabling companies to anticipate consumer wants reasonably than merely reacting to them by switching from reactive help to predictive, customized and self-improving. The result’s enhanced operational effectivity and the power to drive deeper consumer satisfaction and loyalty. By decreasing prices and enhancing service, AI is remodeling name facilities from conventional value facilities into high-value, client-centric hubs that straight impression income.
How are predictive analytics, automation, and NLP enhancing real-time buyer interactions?
The mixing of predictive analytics, automation, and Pure Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionizing how we have interaction with purchasers in actual time. Predictive analytics permits organizations to anticipate consumer habits and provide proactive options. Automation hastens processes, making certain fast responses to consumer queries whereas minimizing human error. Then again, NLP empowers chatbots and digital assistants to interact in additional pure, human-like conversations, enhancing each the standard and pace of service. When mixed, these applied sciences create an atmosphere the place consumer interactions are sooner and extra customized—in the end enhancing the consumer expertise and fostering loyalty.
How does AI contribute to making a extra seamless, omnichannel buyer expertise?
AI is the important thing element of a seamless, omnichannel consumer expertise. It allows corporations to combine interactions throughout numerous channels—whether or not it’s a chatbot on a web site, a dialog on social media, or a telephone name to a contact heart. By consolidating information from these touchpoints, AI ensures the messaging is constant and tailor-made to every consumer. The true energy of AI lies in its capability to personalize these interactions, making certain that purchasers obtain related, context-aware help throughout channels. This creates a frictionless expertise, the place purchasers can transfer from one touchpoint to a different with out shedding continuity.
With in depth expertise working with telecom and media corporations, we now have helped organizations leverage AI to streamline buyer journeys, enhance workflows, and supply a unified expertise. This permits purchasers to create a extra seamless, customized service that enhances satisfaction and drives lasting loyalty.
What are the commonest ache factors organizations face when deploying AI into their name facilities?
One of many greatest challenges organizations face when deploying AI of their name facilities is integrating it with legacy techniques. Many conventional contact facilities, notably these counting on on-premises options, lack the infrastructure to help AI’s superior capabilities. Migrating to the cloud is crucial to unlocking AI’s full potential, however this transition could be advanced and dear. Moreover, AI fashions require high-quality, well-organized information, which legacy techniques typically battle to supply. Guaranteeing a clean transition with out disrupting the shopper expertise is one other important hurdle. Privateness and safety considerations relating to information utilization additionally must be addressed comprehensively.
Organizations want an skilled companion to navigate these challenges—one with a deep understanding of each AI and industry-specific wants. We’ve helped many telecom and media corporations modernize their contact facilities, overcoming these ache factors and making certain seamless transitions that enhance operational effectivity and improve the general buyer expertise.
For instance, Persistent collaborated with a number one U.S. telecommunications know-how supplier to reinforce their contact heart operations. The consumer needed to investigate buyer interactions via their conversational AI platform to achieve insights into buyer satisfaction and agent efficiency. We developed a GCP-backed information analytics layer that processed information from over 30 real-time streaming pipelines, dealing with over one billion messages each day. This answer offered close to real-time insights, serving to the consumer monitor key metrics like caller sentiment and repair satisfaction, in the end enhancing buyer expertise and operational effectivity.
By partnering with specialists who perceive each AI and the telecom {industry}, organizations can overcome frequent deployment challenges, modernize their contact facilities, and unlock useful data-driven insights to reinforce buyer interactions and drive operational enhancements.
What are a few of the greatest variations in how telecom vs. media corporations are adopting AI for consumer service?
The telecommunications sector has lengthy been a pioneer in establishing large-scale contact facilities, pushed by the necessity to handle important companies resembling billing inquiries, new connections, and troubleshooting connectivity points. These features stay central to the {industry}, and AI is more and more leveraged to optimize operations in these areas, as they signify a good portion of consumer help ticket volumes. Given the aggressive panorama, many telecom operators additionally use predictive analytics to anticipate consumer churn, enabling focused advertising and marketing campaigns and retention methods.
In distinction, media corporations deal with AI for various functions, resembling detecting account sharing, managing subscriptions, analyzing viewing patterns, curating content material, and enhancing consumer engagement via automated self-service choices.
At Persistent, we now have labored with each telecom and media corporations to tailor AI options that meet their distinct challenges. For telecom, we deal with enhancing operational efficiencies and leveraging predictive analytics to drive proactive customer support. For media corporations, we purpose to reinforce buyer engagement via AI-driven suggestions, content material personalization, and self-service automation.
In your expertise, what cultural or organizational shifts are obligatory to completely embrace AI in these sectors?
To completely embrace AI, telecom and media corporations should endure a cultural shift towards turning into data-driven organizations. This requires fostering a mindset of steady studying and innovation throughout all departments. AI adoption isn’t just an IT initiative, it requires cross-department collaboration, notably between IT, consumer service, and operations. Corporations should put money into AI expertise and deal with reskilling their present workforce to make sure they’ve the abilities to handle and work alongside AI techniques. Moreover, adopting agile methodologies can be essential to permitting organizations to rapidly iterate and optimize their AI options. Sturdy management is critical to drive these adjustments and be sure that AI initiatives align with total enterprise goals, notably enhancing consumer expertise whereas driving enterprise outcomes.
How does the acquisition of Starfish Associates strengthen Persistent’s AI-powered contact heart and unified communications capabilities?
The acquisition of Starfish Associates considerably enhances Persistent’s place within the AI-powered contact heart and unified communications area. This strategic acquisition builds on our present engineering capabilities within the Contact Middle and Unified Communications area, increasing our AI-driven enterprise transformation experience and reinforcing our deal with operational excellence. Starfish Associates is understood for its cutting-edge Enterprise Communications automation platform, which serves a few of the world’s largest enterprises, together with many Fortune 500 corporations. When mixed with Persistent’s strengths in AI-driven automation, this acquisition permits us to supply much more highly effective, built-in options that streamline workflows, improve consumer engagement, and enhance operational effectivity.
Information safety and privateness are high considerations for organizations in telecom—how is Persistent addressing these in AI-enabled customer support options?
Information safety and privateness are important considerations, particularly within the telecom {industry}, the place consumer information is delicate and extremely regulated. At Persistent, we assist telecom corporations navigate these challenges by implementing AI options that guarantee information safety at each step. We help our purchasers in reaching compliance with international laws resembling GDPR, CCPA, and different information safety legal guidelines, embedding privateness safeguards inside their AI-powered customer support operations.
We help purchasers in integrating strong security measures, together with encryption, anonymization, and entry controls, to safe information all through its lifecycle. Moreover, we guarantee transparency by serving to purchasers preserve full management over their information, providing clear visibility into the way it’s used and managed. By offering ongoing AI mannequin audits and danger assessments, we be sure that our options stay safe, compliant, and adaptable as laws evolve, giving our purchasers the boldness to leverage AI applied sciences responsibly whereas sustaining buyer belief.
Lastly, what does success seem like to you in the case of AI-powered consumer expertise for telecom gamers over the subsequent 5 years?
Over the subsequent 5 years, AI will redefine the position of contact facilities within the telecom {industry}. Success can be measured by the power of telecom corporations to rework conventional name facilities into proactive consumer engagement hubs. Agentic AI will rework telecom buyer expertise by proactively resolving points, providing customized help, and enabling autonomous service actions throughout channels. Studying from interactions to adapt in actual time ensures sooner, smarter, and extra human-like engagement, which is vital for buyer expertise transformation.
By offloading 50%-60% of routine consumer service duties to Agentic AI, telecom operators can enhance effectivity whereas permitting human brokers to deal with extra advanced points. Predictive analytics will play a pivotal position in anticipating consumer wants, whereas omnichannel integration will guarantee a seamless expertise throughout all touchpoints.
At Persistent, we assist telecom and media corporations implement Agentic AI options that drive innovation and enhance buyer interactions. Our experience in AI and telecom allows the creation of smarter, extra agile contact facilities, leveraging information to align with enterprise objectives. Wanting forward, our objective is to assist these organizations securely infuse AI throughout their operations, deepening their reference to clients and positioning them for achievement in a quickly evolving digital panorama.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Persistent Methods.
