Startek’s AI-driven CX push: transforming customer and employee experience

As enterprises worldwide race to meet rising customer expectations, the ability to deliver intelligent, seamless, and empathetic customer experiences (CX) has become mission-critical. Startek, a global leader in customer experience management and digital transformation with over 35 years of expertise, is tackling this challenge head-on.

Operating across 12 countries with a 38,000-strong workforce, Startek blends human intelligence with AI, automation, and advanced analytics to help Fortune 500 companies in telecom, healthcare, retail, and banking transform both customer and employee experiences.

In this exclusive conversation with CiOL, Gurpal Singh, Global Chief Operating Officer at Startek, shares how the company is redefining CX with AI, conversational intelligence, and cloud-enabled scalability while also preparing for the next wave of technologies such as generative AI, edge, and 5G. Excerpts.

Startek has been driving customer experience transformation for over 35 years, how do you see AI and automation reshaping the very definition of CX today?

AI is pushing CX from “fix what’s broken” to “prevent it from breaking”. For years, the industry focused on shaving seconds off handle time. Today, AI enables us to understand intent, emotion and context across a journey, not just a single interaction. That shifts the job from resolving tickets to anticipating needs, nudging the right action and quietly resolving issues before they become problems. In practice, automation now handles repetitive, rules-driven work end to end—status checks, simple billing queries, address updates—so people can lean into empathy, negotiation and trust. What matters isn’t only speed; it’s how understood the customer feels. When a parent calling about a roaming bill hears, “I see you were abroad last week; would you like me to move you to a plan that avoids this next time?” That’s AI plus human judgement turning service into care. For a global operator like us, the real shift is orchestration: models interpreting signals, workflows automating the grunt work, and advisors stepping in for the moments that define the relationship across our 13-country footprint.

Can you share how Startek’s AI and conversational intelligence solutions balance efficiency with human empathy in customer interactions?

We design our stack to help people be more human, not less. Before a conversation even begins, intent and sentiment analysis prepare the advisor with context, likely resolutions and compliance prompts so the first few seconds feel personal, not procedural. During the conversation, copilots summarise long threads, surface next best actions and take on after-call work. That time saving shows up as better listening, calmer pacing and a tone that fits the customer’s state of mind. When a discussion turns sensitive – financial hardship, health or fraud – clear rules route it to specialists with full context and practical coaching tips so the handover feels seamless. We also measure what we value. Our quality frameworks and coaching focus on clarity, empathy and resolution, not just handle time. Advisors receive gentle cues such as “offer a recap” or “mirror the customer’s phrasing”, so efficiency and humanity rise together. The result is a consistent experience at scale that still feels like a real conversation.

Data is at the core of personalisation. What frameworks do you use to turn real-time customer data into predictive, hyper-personalised engagements?

Our approach is privacy-by-design personalisation. We start with a consented, real-time profile that captures only what is needed—recent intents, channel preferences, product holdings and service history—kept minimal and purpose-bound. A governed feature store feeds models for propensity, churn, risk and next best action, while a decisioning layer weighs business rules such as eligibility or inventory, policy constraints like consent and jurisdiction, and the user’s current context—whether they are complaining, browsing or buying—before selecting the right action. Every outcome closes the loop by updating the profile and features. If a retention offer works better for a segment at 6 pm over WhatsApp than email, we adapt by the next interaction. Throughout, guardrails such as role-based access, encryption and policy-led retention keep data protected, and we align to recognised frameworks including ISO 27001/27701, SOC 2, GDPR, the India DPDP Act and regional equivalents. To the customer, this feels like relevance without creepiness—accurate offers, proactive fixes and clear choices about how their data is used.

With cloud and multi-country operations, how do you tackle challenges around scalability, security and compliance while ensuring seamless CX delivery?

We operate a distributed, multi-cloud architecture with regional data zones to meet residency and latency needs, and we rely on infrastructure-as-code to deploy repeatable, auditable environments. That lets us scale a new programme in days rather than months, while standardised APIs make channels, bots and knowledge portable across regions and brands. The goal is to deliver the same quality bar everywhere, with local nuance where it matters. Security follows zero-trust principles—verified identity, least-privilege access, continuous posture checks and encryption in transit and at rest. Compliance controls travel with the workload through classification, masking, retention and audit trails, so the same call flow can run in the Philippines, South Africa or the EU with local rules applied automatically. Operationally, we blend global playbooks for KPIs, coaching and QA with local tuning for language, culture and regulation. That is how we offer a familiar brand experience worldwide while respecting every market we serve.

Startek is equally focused on employee experience (EX), how do you leverage digital tools and AI to upskill, support and empower your workforce?

Great CX starts with great EX. We invest in adaptive learning paths that combine micro-modules, scenario simulators and tailored knowledge checks so people reach competency faster and with greater confidence. In the moment of service, advisors receive quiet prompts that keep them on track—offering a recap, checking authentication or suggesting a self-serve link—while supervisors see coaching opportunities based on observed behaviours rather than only outcome metrics. The aim is to make every live interaction a learning opportunity. Well-being and fairness matter just as much. Workforce tools help balance preferences with demand, flag burnout risk early and enable respectful flexibility. We pair every rollout with clear change management and explainability: what the tool does, what it doesn’t, and how it helps the advisor—not replaces them. That transparency builds trust, and trust drives adoption across our 40,000-strong team.

Looking ahead, which emerging technologies like generative AI, edge or 5G do you believe will be true game changers for CX?

Generative copilots will become the connective tissue of CX, grounded in enterprise knowledge to summarise, draft, reason and retrieve across channels. The real gain is not flashy chat; it is the quiet removal of friction for both customers and advisors. Edge computing combined with 5G will unlock privacy-preserving, low-latency experiences such as on-device transcription and translation, real-time voice analytics in stores and kiosks, and resilient service when cloud links are unreliable. Equally important is the rise of responsible AI tooling—bias checks, policy engines and observability—which will separate prototypes from production because you cannot scale what you cannot govern. Finally, multimodal interfaces that blend voice, text and vision will feel natural: you might show a broken part on camera, receive the exact workflow instantly and switch to voice for the final steps, with context carried over the whole way.

If you had to paint a picture of what customer experience will look like in 2030, what’s your vision?

By 2030, the best service will be mostly invisible. Networks heal themselves overnight, subscriptions adjust before you ask and financial providers reach out with solutions rather than scripts. When humans enter the loop, it will be for moments that demand trust, nuance and creativity—hardship, life events and complex decisions where empathy is the differentiator. Journeys will be multimodal and continuous. You will start on chat, show a photo, switch to voice and finish in-app without repeating yourself. Advisors will evolve into relationship managers supported by powerful copilots that take on the heavy lifting and leave space for genuine conversation. Brands will compete on how transparently, fairly and sustainably they use technology as much as on what technology they use. The winners will orchestrate people, data and intelligent systems into a humane operating model where doing right by the customer is the fastest path to value.