Artificial intelligence (AI) will forever change customer interactions.
This was the spark that gave life to Spitch back in 2014 and it still burns brightly today. Though Spitch has become an end-to-end GenAI conversational platform, back then our vision was simple: bring automatic speech recognition (ASR) to market for Swiss German and its major dialects in Switzerland.
We knew that by mastering Swiss languages and their main dialects, we could master dialects in other languages too. From day one, we believed this capability would be crucial for every customer contact center.
Though the scope of that vision—and our core languages—has since expanded significantly, the foundational ideas and principles remain largely unchanged. In celebration of our ten-year anniversary as a company, I’d like to revisit our origin story, with the help of some of the key figures that have made Spitch’s evolution possible.
In doing so, I hope to paint a vibrant picture of the foundation that our company stands upon.
This is the first post in our Spitch: 10 Years of Insight blog series.
Few sectors grow and evolve quite like customer service. At the same time, everybody has had a less than stellar contact center experience at one point or another—even today. In 2014, we saw the applicability of ASR/natural language understanding (NLU) technology in easing this friction and, by extension, enabling AI in the Swiss contact center market. At the time, everybody was still waiting for someone to take the lead.
So we did. But there is no long term success without building a trustful partnership with our customers. Our team excels in professionally connecting with our customers at all levels, showing passion and professionalism, motivation and knowledge.
We guide our customers through their digital transformation process and most importantly we joint build that collaborative spirit that overcomes any barrier and leads to joint success. We are proud to be part of this great community and members of this extended professional family.
Thankfully, Francisco Campillo, Javier Dieguez, Josef Novak, and Igor Nozhov had the technical expertise that I lacked, and which was necessary for realizing our vision. They used their backgrounds in coding and linguistics to build a platform that solved for three core needs, in particular:
“We spent quite a bit of time brainstorming, trying to find a concept that we could build a scalable MVP around, and that integrated with our existing experience as well as location here in Zürich. We eventually settled on speech recognition for Swiss German dialects. It looked like an unserved or underserved niche, and sparked interest in the local community.”
Josef Novak
CIO
Being the first company to support ASR for all Swiss German dialects put Spitch in a unique position. As we worked with our first handful of customers, we began to see the broader potential for speech recognition in the contact center. In 2016, we received market requests from Italy that led to our development of Speech Analytics and Agent Assistant.
This was the beginning of our expansion beyond Swiss borders. Thanks to the credibility we built in Switzerland, we were able to tap into other markets with local entities and teams, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, and the United States. Soon, we evolved into a global player, with customers across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
If you’ve spent enough time in tech, you won’t be surprised at our biggest risk early on. So many companies—especially when they enter a space as new as speech recognition was in 2014—are all sizzle but no steak. Their idea: brilliant. The vision: supreme. The underlying technology stack?
Not so much.
So we invested heavily in building a platform capable of meeting the scope of our global vision. From the outset, the Spitch platform was built to:
“Since its inception, the Spitch Omnichannel Conversational Platform introduced a new generation of solutions that help contact centers transform from agent-centric to AI-centric. Through early adoption of cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI and LLM, we protect our clients, invest in an enterprise-grade platform while supporting their business growth.” Vadim Shchepinov
Product Director, Vice CEO
With the platform in place, we were prepared to iterate new applications based on customer needs and customer feedback. As time went on, this customer base expanded globally, which put the strength of our people in the spotlight.
It is the strength of our people, I believe, that has enabled Spitch’s enduring success.
“There is no long term success without building a trustful partnership with our customers. Our team excels in professionally connecting with our customers at all levels, showing passion and professionalism, motivation and knowledge. We guide our customers through their digital transformation process and most importantly we joint build that collaborative spirit that overcomes any barrier and leads to joint success. We are proud to be part of this great community and members of this extended professional family.” Piergiorgio Vittori
CEO of Spitch US Corp. & VP International Business Development
Trust is at the heart of all that we do, both internally and externally. Throughout the entire past decade of doing business, internal trust has never been a problem. We’ve encountered challenges, yes, and conflict; but everybody believes in the Spitch vision for an efficient, customer-friendly contact center.
That trust is contagious. It’s what our partners and customers have come to value most. And it’s one of the main reasons that Spitch has 100 loyal customers, many of whom—if not all—have stayed with us since the beginning.
I think all of my colleagues would agree that Spitch’s development of an IVR solution for Swisscard was a major milestone for our company. A joint venture of Credit Suisse and American Express, Swisscard is the largest credit card processor in Switzerland. If you live here, you probably use Swisscard.
The opportunity to help Swisscard make their customer experience even better was a pivotal one. In 2018, our solution helped Swisscard win the prestigious Golden Headset Award.
“The great partnership with Swisscard has been built on one small use case leading to the application of many different features on the Spitch platform over time.” Stephan Fehlmann
Vice President DACH
This accomplishment was followed by another milestone in Spitch’s journey: securing our first round of external fundraising in 2021. Again, our operations rely heavily on the principle of trust. The arrival of external investors was a strong indication that that trust extended beyond our internal team of founders, who up until 2021 provided the bulk investments needed to continue growing.
Thanks to these early wins, today new milestones and customer triumphs accumulate much faster and in greater numbers. I was recently reading about the success of Migros Bank, who we worked with to develop an innovative voice bot that handles queries 24/7, sends relevant links via SMS, and provides other self-service options. Our teams also implemented voice biometrics to authenticate callers during support conversations.
Throughout all of these milestones, our team has remained to organic growth, both in terms of our team members and our customers.
The contact center continues to grow and evolve toward greater personalization and deeper integration. With respect to GenAI and LLMs, the initial hype cycle has panned out, with 80% of organizations planning to increase investments in these technologies. Even still, steady goes the ship for Spitch.
Our iterative approach to new product development is based on a golden rule: pragmatic hype adoption. This rule has ensured a certain standard of quality across our product rollouts, from Spitch analytics and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to knowledge base and text messaging.
Moving forward, look for Spitch to continue to round out what has become a truly omnichannel platform, one that handles 100M+ annual transactions in support of 100+ customers. Our focus will remain on hybrid-cloud deployments of our GenAI and LLM-powered solutions.
Thanks to the strength of our people, we’re not lacking in ideas. The challenge is to work with our teams, partners, and customers to find the solutions that really make business sense. Today, we accompany every customer through their digitalisation process as trusted advisors and partners, embracing the latest evolution in technology and recommending what we believe is best for our customers. After all, technology is a commodity and an enabler to solving business needs. As I often remind myself, we cannot forget who our customer has been from the beginning:
The contact center.
