Customer Experience Management (CEM) plays a critical role in any company’s sustained growth index. With this market expected to grow from USD 8.5 billion in 2020 to USD 14.9 billion by 2025, companies are looking to enhance their CEM strategies, while providing a holistic customer experience. Emmersion is one such rapidly growing SaaS company that specializes in AI-powered language assessment technology. Based in Lehi, Utah, USA, the company proves language ability for employment and education for the nearly two billion English language learners and speakers in the world.

The Journey

Brigham Tomco, CEO and Co-founder of Emmersion is a serial entrepreneur, with an undying passion for education, mentorship and economic development. He says he was constantly looking for an edge in recruiting and enhancing customer satisfaction indexes as he built an offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), focused on staffing software developers and a 500-plus-seat market research contact center. ‘’Contact center managers and executives are looking to hire and retain the best talent and improve upon customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores in order to increase the bottom line. “Once I recognized the need for automated language testing, I cofounded Emmersion with a goal to revolutionize the industry,’’ notes this entrepreneur. After several years of research and development, the first fully automated speaking test was launched in 2018.

Revolutionizing Language Screening methods

Emmersion recognized the need for contact centers to properly screen the language skills of job applicants. It has developed an AI-driven and adaptive language assessment engine that provides accurate and immediate reports in English and several other languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. This tool helps global contact centers automate bilingual language screening to more quickly, accurately, and affordably hire qualified talent, reduce turnover, and improve customer satisfaction scores.

Brigham opines that organizations should focus on properly screening job candidates for their language proficiency as a foundation skill. “Most companies use internal screening methods that are erroneous, time-consuming and unscalable. Automated testing provides for immediate results, unlimited scalability and improves accuracy with the removal of human error and bias. With automated language testing, companies can hire better while also saving time.’’

Emmersion’s Language Tools

Emmersion’s speaking test is touted as the first fully automated speaking test, which makes it the only speaking test in the world that is completely driven by AI and machine learning with no human involvement for testing or scoring. With a fully automated assessment, results are available immediately. “Additionally, this automated assessment leaves no room for human error or bias and includes adaptivity, drastically improving accuracy. The test is also cloud-based, so it can be taken anytime, anywhere, and by as many people as needed—dramatically improving scalability,’’ adds Brigham.

Pandemic’s Effect on the Industry

To cope with the new normal of working from home for most of the global workforce, Emmersion has diversified its services to include cloud-based solutions. “Companies can screen job candidates’ language abilities virtually since face-to-face interaction is limited, and hiring has also gone virtual,’’ says Brigham.

The Success Journey

A top 5 global contact center client of Emmersion experienced a 20% growth in their CSAT scores and a 9/10 end client score in just a short span of two months. “The contact center was experiencing low CSAT scores, and chat (specifically grammatical errors) was identified as a root cause. This contact center used our reading and grammar assessment to test and improve agents’ ability to communicate with the customer over chat’’ signs off Brigham. The contact center is now using the speaking assessment tool to also assess and improve agent ability for interactions over the phone.