Simha Sadasiva, the CEO and co-founder of Ushur, a firm that automates client experiences, has spent the last thirty years developing software. When India's technology industry was still in its infancy in the 1990s, he began his career there as a consultant, helping to shape the country's destiny as a leader in software technology. Sadasiva joined the founding team of a company that would go public in just six years as a result of this experience. It gave him a plethora of team-building and product-scaling knowledge that would be useful when he founded Ushur.

Sadasiva saw a trend gaining traction, which was the initial spark that led to the formation of Ushur. People's preferences for brief and snappy interactions were changing as a result of the introduction of cellphones. Individuals began to prefer texting one other brief messages instead of waiting for a phone call. In addition, instead of reading a longer piece on a traditional news platform, they started using Twitter and other platforms where they could obtain quick news updates. This phenomena was named "Micro- EngagementsTM" by Sadasiva.

"The fundamental idea behind founding Ushur was that consumers' preferences for engagement have changed along with the world," he stated. Enabling businesses to interact with customers through micro-engagements to full customer journeys has a commercial rationale and opportunity. The realization that we could scale up the distribution and exchange of such micro-engagement with customers through automation was the "aha" moment in this.

A challenging time in Sadasiva's life served as another important source of inspiration for Ushur. There was a lot of conflict while he was taking care of his mother as the primary caregiver and interacting with financial services, insurance, and other businesses. These meetings frequently required him to make excessively lengthy phone calls in which he had to repeat the same material over and over. He was aware that these were self-service driven or automatable operations. "Many of my personal experiences influenced Ushur in terms of the target audience we were aiming to attract and the direction our platform and product were ultimately taking." In order to better represent its goal of making sure individuals have an easy and streamlined experience with the healthcare, insurance, and financial services organizations they depend on, Sadasiva adopted the name Ushur.

Addressing the issue in the marketplace

Even in 2014, when Ushur was formed, there is still a strong desire for better client experiences. The way that businesses engage with their customers has greatly improved, but much more needs to be done. Sadasiva brought up the point that we are at the mercy of call centers in the event of a flight cancellation or delivery problem. Even with their improved tools, the agents may still need to engage in a protracted and taxing process in order to get the intended result.

In addition to negatively affecting customer satisfaction, manual processes are expensive, ineffective, and hinder rapid scalability. In order to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs, Ushur was developed to assist businesses in automating their customer experience workflows.

All of this is related to the idea of Micro- EngagementsTM. Regardless of where a consumer is in the trip, Sadasiva clarified that these are the most fundamental components of any customer journey. "You can break down the customer lifecycle into these micro-engagements," he stated. Pre-sale, onboarding, and post-sale are just a few examples of how they can be divided into manageable, repeated steps that can be setup and taken part in in a bigger setting. Our theory is that in order to provide a lifetime of satisfying customer experiences, we must ensure that each microengagement can be performed effectively, automatically, and with a solution.

Neglecting to provide a satisfactory experience poses a considerable danger of losing customers. For instance, a client is far more likely to renew their insurance with the same company if they had a positive experience when they need to make a claim. Should their experience be unsatisfactory, they will most likely move to a different supplier. In a similar vein, there's a possibility they'll give up and go to a rival that provides a more efficient onboarding procedure if they have a bad experience. "Every brand experience should be prioritized for lifetime value and stickiness whenever there is a business case to introduce a delightful, automated self-service experience."

Constructing Ushur

One of the most difficult tasks for Ushur's team while starting a new business was staying within their budget. Ushur's initial two years of development were devoted solely to product construction, but such work requires funding. Thankfully, the team was able to secure the backing of angel and seed investors to assist in launching its minimal viable product. Following the completion of the minimal viable product, Ushur was able to commence scaling once it was acquired by a Fortune 500 insurance company.

The team's largest obstacle, though, wasn't obtaining financial backing but rather locating clients. Ushur needed to approach this strategically rather than haphazardly trying to recruit clients wherever it could. "I knew that we were going to target insurance firms for our market segmentation," he stated, "since they are the largest consumers of contact centers and call centers. If you look at the industries that spend the most money on call centers, financial services, insurance, and banking top the list. Ushur saw insurance as the ideal place to start because it offered a sizable market for a revolution in customer experiences.

What to anticipate from Ushur

Currently, Ushur provides a customer experience automation platform driven by AI that automates the entire customer journey. Through its platform, businesses may integrate highly customized, self-serve consumer interaction throughout the customer experience. An insurer might use technology to automate underwriting, billing, client outreach, policy management, claim forms, and more. Ushur wants to save expenses while raising customer satisfaction and staff engagement levels.

As a provider, Ushur stands out due to its emphasis on generating genuine value. According to Sadasiva, whenever a new technological advancement is made, there is always a lot of excitement and a desire for people to try it out. This is comparable to the current state of artificial intelligence, especially generative AI. Unfortunately, most of the time the solution is either not matured enough to be of true business value or lacks a real use case. Ushur, however, has approached its goods in a different way. Instead of heedlessly adhering to market hype, the team investigates areas in which it may assist clients in realizing value.

Enhancing the customer experience, as gauged by the net promoter score (NPS), is one way the platform adds value for customers. Ushur can determine whether it is truly offering value to its clientele by utilizing these scores. Ushur's automated survey software, for instance, may help customers increase their net promoter score by 40% and, on average, cut down on processing time by 32%, demonstrating the true value of its technology. The capacity to enhance productivity and perceive value with clarity allows clients to concentrate on growing their businesses and looking for new growth prospects.

Sadasiva gave a few instances of actual situations in which a client's operations could truly benefit from the Ushur platform's differentiation. During peak seasons, the first is adjusting to an unexpected surge in work. Employing temporary workers to assist is the usual response to periods of the year when a company's workload spikes, such as a surge in requests for proposals (RFPs) during the group benefits quoting season. Ushur can readily expand to the higher levels because it automates a large number of back-office processes.

Businesses can also use technology to shorten the time it now takes to finish a task. Sadasiva brought up one of Ushur's insurance clients who was contacting policyholders by phone to obtain information pertaining to claims. Normally, this process took four weeks to finish, but Ushur's platform can finish them in less than an hour.

"Ushur is a very broad platform with deep front-office, middle-office, and back-office capabilities," stated Sadasiva. In the industry, that is extremely unusual. We provide a no-code method for putting experience automation together. Rather than requiring software development, we enable business users to put up these modular systems by simply dragging and dropping parts, like to Lego pieces, to solve any problem that causes friction in the user experience.

Future plans

Even though the economy proved to be difficult for many SaaS companies in 2023, Ushur saw growth throughout this time. Throughout the year, the company accomplished a number of noteworthy milestones, one of which was the completion of its $50 million Series C investment round. Leading the investment was Third Point Ventures, with participation from Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures, and Pentland Ventures among its current backers. The company was able to intensify its plans for expansion—which included introducing new goods and breaking into untapped markets—thanks to this investment boom. Ushur is presently expanding its clientele in the EU, US, Canada, and APAC region as part of this.

In addition to this expansion, Ushur established several new alliances in 2023. Among them is Guidewire, which provides P&C insurers with digital, core, analytics, and machine learning solutions. Through the relationship, insurers were able to enhance their customer experience capabilities by having access to Ushur's technologies through the Guidewire Marketplace. A significant alliance was also established with the business transformation firm Virtusa last year. Their joint goal is to provide organizations all over the world with "unprecedented automation, efficiency, and security."

Ushur plans to continue it in 2024 by using this momentum. With a partnership with cloud contact center solution provider Five9, it has gotten off to a head start in 2019. The partnership's goal is to assist companies in seamlessly incorporating Ushur's well-known CXA capabilities into their own offerings.

Regarding novel approaches, the group is presently developing a few use cases that will make use of generative AI. Additionally, Ushur intends to keep offering prebuilt digital engagements that offer time-to-value in a matter of weeks and are tailored to the particular requirements of its clients in the insurance, financial services, and healthcare industries.

"Why should a company work with Ushur?" Sadasiva asked in closing. While technology is fantastic, our clients will tell you that our people are much more valuable. We have brought together an incredible team that spans the entire organization, globally. The experience with employees is nearly the same wherever you speak with them. Our products are improved by the wonderful people we hire.