UJET the 'Technology Under the Covers' for Google Cloud's Contact Center Solution

For channel partners, it’s hard not to notice the technology behind cloud contact center provider UJET.

The organization, which recently celebrated its seventh year in business, has garnered several accolades. For example, it won this year’s prestigious Best of Enterprise Connect Overall for its CX Intercloud. However, Ujet’s prominence may be slightly overshadowed by the company it keeps. Google Ventures is a Ujet investor. It has strategic alliances with AWS, Salesforce and Google Cloud, to name a few. We’ll get to UJET’s relationship with Google Cloud in a moment.

But first it’s important to understand the company’s ethos. Officials have described UJET as “reimagining” the contact center for modern consumers and brands. At its core, UJET is a cloud-native, mobile-focused and multichannel customer support product.

Modern Cloud Architecture

COMMfusion’s Blair Pleasant

“I’d say that one of UJET’s biggest differentiations is its focus on mobile capabilities and its ability to leverage functions and capabilities from the mobile device, which most other CCaaS providers can’t do,” said Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at COMMfusion. “It makes getting customer support through the mobile device seamless, leveraging a variety of channels including voice, video, text, etc. I don’t think other vendors have this level of functionality when it comes to mobile customer care.”

Pleasant added that UJET uses a modern cloud architecture, but they’re not the only ones who can do this.

“Certainly, Amazon Connect, leveraging the AWS platform, is extremely scalable,” she said.

UJET is also federating multiple cloud platforms, which only a handful of competitors can do (Genesys is doing a lot in the multicloud area, Pleasant said.). UJET uses a service mesh to create a single cloud to load balance the entire stack, so that end customers perceive it as one system. This is different in terms of uptime and reliability from what other vendors provide, Pleasant added.

‘Agile and Quick to Move’

UJET claims its CCaaS 3.0 is the world’s most advanced contact center. It’s a bold assertion; however, customers report dramatic reductions in areas such as handle time, down 30% for some organizations using UJET’s products. When it comes to contact center employees, the company’s platform can linearly scale tens of thousands of agents. For a single tenant, most cap out at 3,000 and must start “stitching multiple tenants,” UJET said.

UJET functions like a startup but it doesn’t bill itself as one. The company, which has more than 200 employees and three offices worldwide, releases features every two weeks.

UJET’s Vasili Triant

“We’re very agile and quick to move,” said UJET COO Vasili Triant. “So, while we have processes that we continue to put in place as we grow, we’re not like ‘bureaucratic’ and stuck in the mud.”

It’s that agility which, officials said, made working with Google an easy relationship.

“The fact that Google chose UJET as its CCaaS partner speaks volumes, as Google could have partnered with any number of more established CCaaS players, but chose UJET for its scalability, reliability, functionality and capabilities,” Pleasant said.

Google Cloud reached out to UJET because customers were requesting a turnkey contact center solution from the cloud giant. Google Cloud is known for developing contact center toolkits but not an all-in-one product.

“What Google was doing before was providing a lot of tools that companies like us or others could take and build into an AI toolkit for virtual agents, for chatbots, for natural language processing,” Triant said.

Google Cloud and the Contact Center

As many would argue, Google is the No. 1 natural language processor in the world. However, the company utilized its relationship with UJET for …

… the development of Google’s Contact Center AI solution. UJET became the “technology under the covers,” as Triant said.

UJET’s Brian Leonard

That technology is different than other AI products on the market, the company claims. Typically, AI “bits” embed into the front end or back end of a platform. However, this type of embedding often leads to unclean handoffs between, say, a chatbot and the agent. Alternatively, the UJET team says (without giving up too much proprietary information) that they “make the data flow together seamlessly so that it’s all unified.”

Additionally, what makes UJET different from other CCaaS players is that “we don’t store any of the PII (personally identifiable information) within our platform,” said Brian Leonard, head of the company’s channel and alliances marketing. It all gets written to and read from the CRM or into the system of record in real time. With some other systems, that data is in disparate places, negating the efficacy of the AI.

“The real issue with AI right now, to really make it work, it’s got to have the right data. One of the key reasons our AI platform is so powerful is because of the data integrity we can enable on the back end,” Leonard said.

Just as important, maybe even more so, is protecting that data. UJET has built its platform with redundancy in mind. Spokespersons said that UJET’s CX Intercloud offer provides customers with resilience and business continuity at the infrastructure layer. They guarantee 100% uptime.

“We’ve done that triple level of redundancy not only within the core platform, but also at the telecom layer. And that telecom layer is probably one of the most susceptible outage failure points,” Leonard said.

He added that this redundancy is an advantage for UJET customers as telco outages are a major challenge for the market and their competitors.

A Smaller Network of Partners

Beyond the ins and outs of the technology, UJET wants to create new opportunities for partners.

Traditionally, there are one or two models in the marketplace for contact center channel partners. They sell a product, making a margin on the item. However, they don’t deliver services because they’re only a sales agent. Conversely, resellers sell the product and configure it. Yet, when delving into the Salesforces of the world and CRMs, it’s not about selling the product, it’s all about the services.

According to UJET, what Google is accomplishing for partners is “both a services and a sales momentum.” Partners will be able to make money on the product and on the services for the customers.

UJET’s Steve Infante

“This is important,” said Steve Infante, Ujet’s SVP of global channels.

“The marketplace is starting to get really crowded,” Infante said. “A lot of times in the traditional model, there are five or six people bidding on the same deal for just the contact center software. We’ve narrowed our focus in the channel to address this. We’re seeing the most success when we lean in with fewer partners that have invested and understand our go to market. They’re finding differentiation for themselves. It really benefits them quite a bit.”

Part of finding that differentiation means partners must embrace a broad understanding of a digital evolution, said Infante, including system integration.

“That’s where the partners could come in and really add incremental value to the product itself. And that’s why we go to market as a team, side by side, with our partner community that has those skills and capabilities. In addition to deploying the product, they have the ability to help with adoption and transformation. It’s highly successful for us.”