From day one, we believed that Spitch technology would be important for each and every customer contact center. Turning that vision into a product, one that we could adapt to the needs of each customer, has required constant innovation.
After all, only 5% of new products hit the mark. Being one of them has meant working hand in hand with our customers to build conversational AI products that actually make a difference.
Looking back at our ten years of innovation, I can see the invisible hand of our customers, partners, and product philosophy guiding the company’s trajectory. Indeed, much has happened between how our product began and what it is today.
Few areas of business evolve and grow as rapidly as the contact center space, which spans industries like banking, insurance, and telecommunications and others that have massive customer communications. New trends and technologies shape the trajectory every day.
Isn’t it nice to know that your platform has a proven track record of adapting fast and smart?
This is the fourth post in our Spitch: 10 Years of Insight blog series. Read the previous post here.
“Together, we offer a unique end-to-end solution—from infrastructure to service—simplifying the customer experience and increasing efficiency with platforms that deliver fast, tangible value."
Partik Spoerri,
Head of Process & Workflow Solutions at Swisscom
Around 2014, Spitch introduced speech recognition to Switzerland with the first-ever automatic speech recognition (ASR) solution for Swiss German and its main dialects. This was closely followed by our first end-to-end contact center product in 2016, which laid the groundwork for our platform-and-product philosophy.
Back then, no other firm had taken such a bold leap into speech recognition for the Swiss contact center market. In 2017, Spitch landed its first conversational AI customer in Switzerland, a customer that is still with us today: Swisscard.
Internally, most of the Spitch team members still view this as a major turning point toward a period of rapid, forward-thinking innovation.
“Starting with a technology only, discovering what it can be used for, developing a product and growing it to a platform has taken a lot of flexibility and customer centricity." Stephan Fehlmann,
Vice President DACH, Spitch
There’s the Conversational AI platform and then there are the products.
As you might imagine, the Spitch platform evolves at a slightly different pace than the products we build on it. Our Chief Innovation Officer conducts extensive research. Based on the CIO’s conclusions, a dedicated research and development team updates the platform on a more or less quarterly frequency, allowing us to accommodate Generative AI (GenAI), and large language models (LLM) in a way that nobody else does, as well as other new developments.
This creates the strength, stability, and flexibility we need, at the platform level, to continue developing new applications based on customer needs. We build those products using a far more agile model. That is:
To that end, our product team constantly gathers knowledge from customers to improve all aspects of our products and the Conversational AI platform. During the demo/MVP phase, our innovation people, pre-sale professionals, and developers work with customers as one cohesive team.
And it all happens quite fast. We have regular agile committees where we involve not only developers and the product owners, but also customer success colleagues who meet customers and pre-sales people.
These groups decide together on the interfaces, connectors, use cases, features, and applications—new features and use cases—as well as what it should look like and how it should be taken to the market. It's a multinational effort, including insights from teams in Italy, Germany, and the UK.
“Agile product development is one of the key factors in our success. It allows us to quickly integrate customer feedback and continuously innovate, allowing us to stay ahead of market trends and deliver solutions that meet the changing needs of the industry like no other."
Vadim Shchepinov,
Product Director, Spitch
This has been the approach since the beginning.
In 2018, Spitch successfully launched its omnichannel conversational AI platform, including three core products:
Together, these three products reflected the direction the market—and our customers—wanted to go: comprehensive omnichannel conversational AI that enabled greater efficiency, and better experiences, across the board.
It was at this time that Spitch became an industry-recognized leader in conversational AI in Switzerland, receiving the Golden Headset Award for the solution it developed for Swisscard, helping Spitch to:
This was also the time of our first sales and implementations by Spitch partners, underscoring broader market validation and an acceleration in enterprise sales and growth.
“Having created market awareness not only for the topic of Conversational AI but also for the Spitch brand, customer requests suddenly went beyond the existing product line, motivating us to not only expand our strategic partner network but also platform to more application areas."
Stephan Fehlmann,
Vice President DACH, Spitch
Around this time (2018), Spitch added two new products to the platform:
Both of these products integrate seamlessly with the others, and all five are built on the same core AI engine. Together, they comprise an omnichannel Conversational AI platform ready to meet the evolving needs of the modern contact center.
This period of new product development helped Spitch acquire its first customers in the U.S., Middle East, and Central Asia, while opening the doors to new strategic partnerships with industry leaders. In 2022, Spitch released managed services and secured its first round of investor funding.
“CC means more ‘customer centric’ more than just a ‘contact center’ and the platformic approach is the only way to make it. Those who think strategically would always prefer to grow within one platform rather than with different applications. Envisioning this need, Spitch keeps adding products on its platform, developing or acquiring promising startups. More to come." Alexey Popov,
CEO, Spitch
A decade of steady innovation led to a period of accelerated growth. In 2023, Spitch simultaneously secured Series A funding and incorporated Agent Assist into the Spitch platform, a product module aimed at supercharging agent productivity through a unified, AI-powered workspace.
At the same time, Spitch tasked its internal innovation teams with addressing rapid market changes, including GenAI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI content indexing, and new developments in LLM implementation. Their hard work helped build the powerful core AI that fuels the entire Spitch platform, Agent Assist included.
Today, Spitch makes it easier than ever to deliver natural and intuitive support interactions, thanks to these new technologies. A true AI-centric solution for contact centers.
Of course, innovation extends beyond platform and product. Spitch has recently introduced a customer success function to better serve its 100+ customers and their 60M+ annual transactions.
Even a cursory glance at the recap of Spitch’s 2024 Advisory Board Meeting will give you an idea of how far product innovation has progressed since 2014 — and how ambitious our vision is for the future. As always, every new improvement is based on the conversations that we have with our customers.
"Every caller and every conversation with our customers continues to help drive innovation at Spitch."
Josef Novak,
CIO of Spitch
