Interview: Tata Communications on Building Connected Customer Experiences

April 2026

Telecoms & Connectivity

Molly Gatford

Senior Research Analyst

Earlier this year, Tata Communications won a Platinum Award at the Future Digital Awards for its Kaleyra.ai Customer Data Platform; a solution designed to unify fragmented customer data and enable real-time, personalised engagement across channels. To understand more, we sat down with Gaurav Anand, VP & Global Head, Customer Interaction Suite, Tata Communications, to explore how the platform is helping brands deliver more connected, context-rich customer experiences.

How is the customer engagement landscape shifting toward more connected, context-rich experiences, and what forces are driving brands to rethink how they communicate with their customers today?

Customer engagement is undergoing a fundamental shift. It’s no longer about managing individual channels - it’s about sustaining a continuous, connected conversation with the customer over time.

Customers don’t experience brands in silos. They don’t think in terms of chat versus messaging versus voice. They simply expect the brand to remember them, understand their intent, and pick up exactly where the last interaction ended. If a conversation starts on WhatsApp, continues on a website, and then moves to a live agent, the expectation is simple: no repetition, no loss of context, no restarting the journey.

Several forces are accelerating this shift:

• Rising customer expectations for seamless, personalised experiences that feel coherent across touchpoints
• Advances in AI, which now make it possible to understand intent, retain context, and automate increasingly complex interactions
• The convergence of conversations and commerce, where service, sales, and transactions are happening within the same interaction
• A renewed focus on first party data and privacy, which is forcing brands to rethink how customer data is unified, governed, and activated responsibly.

The implication for brands is clear. Customer engagement can no longer be designed or operated on a channel-by-channel basis. That model inevitably leads to fragmented, repetitive experiences.

What’s required instead is a connected engagement foundation: one where data, AI, and communication platforms work as a single system. This allows interactions to feel continuous, context-rich, and purpose-driven, with the focus firmly on resolving the customer’s need end-to-end, rather than simply completing a transaction.

In this new landscape, great customer experience isn’t about faster responses on more channels. It’s about intelligent continuity - where every interaction builds on the last and moves the relationship forward with a focus on driving outcomes.

As data becomes the backbone of modern business communications, how is Tata Communications enabling enterprises to unlock new levels of personalisation and customer intelligence?

As customer engagement becomes more real-time, personalised, and conversational, data has moved from being a supporting asset to the backbone of modern business communications. The real challenge for most enterprises today isn’t data scarcity - it’s fragmentation.

Customer data typically sits across disconnected systems, channels, and devices. When that data remains siloed, even the most advanced engagement strategies fall short; resulting in generic interactions that lack relevance, timing, and context.

At Tata Communications, we help enterprises overcome this by enabling a unified, real-time understanding of the customer, so personalisation is driven by live behaviour rather than static assumptions. Through our composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), powered by Commotion, organisations can bring together structured, behavioural, and interaction data across digital touchpoints to create a continuously evolving customer profile.

Several principles are central to this approach:

• Activation without friction, using a zero copy architecture that allows enterprises to work with data where it already lives, rather than constantly moving or duplicating it
• Real time intelligence, so interactions can respond to what a customer is doing now, not what they did last week
• Persistent identity across channels and devices; ensuring context is retained as customers move between touchpoints
• AI driven segmentation and predictive insights that enable brands to anticipate intent rather than simply react to it.

The impact of this is significant. Enterprises can move beyond static, campaign based communication toward dynamic, lifecycle driven engagement, where every interaction adapts to the customer’s behaviour, needs, and intent in the moment.

Ultimately, data led personalisation isn’t about sending more targeted messages. It’s about giving every part of the organisation’s AI systems, digital channels, and human agents a shared, intelligent, and contextual view of the customer, so engagement feels relevant, timely, and genuinely connected at every stage of the relationship.

What barriers do organisations face when delivering personalised, omnichannel experiences at scale, and how does Tata Communications’ architecture ensure these experiences remain secure, compliant, and frictionless?

Delivering personalised, omnichannel experiences at scale is far more complex behind the scenes than it appears to customers. What customers experience as a seamless interaction is often underpinned by highly fragmented systems, distributed data, and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.

The most common barriers enterprises face fall into four broad areas:

• Fragmented data and systems, where customer context is spread across Customer Relationship Management (CRM), commerce, service, and communication platforms
• Latency and performance constraints, which limit the ability to personalise interactions in real time
• Rising regulatory and compliance pressures, including privacy, consent management, and data localisation across regions
• Expanded security risk, as interactions span multiple channels, partners, and technology layers.

When these challenges aren’t addressed holistically, personalisation breaks down, experiences become inconsistent, and trust is eroded - often without the customer ever seeing the root cause.

At Tata Communications, our approach is based on a simple but critical principle: security, compliance, and scalability cannot be retrofitted. They must be embedded into the foundation of the engagement architecture from day one.

This is why our platform architecture is modular and API first; designed to support global scale while maintaining control and resilience. Enterprise systems and engagement channels are connected through secure integration layers; enabling context to flow without creating unnecessary exposure or duplication. Data is processed in high performance, resilient environments; allowing real time engagement without compromising reliability.

Equally important, governance is built in - not bolted on. Consent management, regulatory alignment, and data residency requirements are supported natively, while end to end encryption and policy enforcement are embedded at the infrastructure level. This ensures that as interactions scale across regions and channels, they remain compliant by design.

The result is frictionless customer engagement that doesn’t come at the expense of security or trust. For global enterprises and highly regulated industries, this foundation is what makes it possible to deliver personalised, omnichannel experiences confidently at scale, in real time, and without introducing operational or regulatory risk.

How does Tata Communications’ CDP translate customer data into tangible business outcomes while integrating seamlessly with enterprises’ existing digital infrastructure?

Most organisations today are not short on customer data - they are short on actionable customer intelligence. The real challenge isn’t collecting data, but translating it into timely decisions that influence customer behaviour and drive measurable business outcomes.

Tata Communications’ CDP is designed to bridge that gap by operationalising customer intelligence across the entire engagement ecosystem. By unifying behavioural, transactional, and interaction data, it allows enterprises to move from hindsight driven insights to real time understanding of customer intent, and to act on that intent in the moment it matters.

This enables outcomes that are directly tied to business performance, such as:

• Early identification of risk, through customer scoring and churn prediction models which surface signals before disengagement becomes irreversible
• More effective cross sell and upsell, where offers and journeys are driven by actual behaviour and preferences rather than static segments
• Real time journey recovery, including abandonment detection and intervention as customers drop off mid process
• Trigger-based lifecycle engagement, where communications adapt instantly to customer actions instead of relying on pre planned campaigns.

A critical enabler of this is seamless integration with existing enterprise infrastructure. The CDP is designed to work natively with CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, commerce engines, and communication channels, so activation happens in real time and in context rather than through manual hand offs or delayed batch processes.

The result is a shift from campaign-centric engagement to always on, intent driven interaction. Enterprises see tangible outcomes, higher conversion rates, reduced churn, improved customer lifetime value, and more efficient use of marketing spend because customer data is no longer sitting in dashboards. It is actively shaping decisions, journeys, and experiences as they unfold.

Ultimately, translating data into value isn’t about more analytics. It’s about creating a connected intelligence layer that allows the business to respond to customers with relevance, speed, and precision at scale.

In the emerging era of agentic AI, how is Tata Communications’ CDP innovating to help businesses evolve their communications strategies through automation, predictive engagement, and enhanced customer understanding?

We are entering a new phase of customer engagement, where AI moves beyond responding to interactions and begins proactively orchestrating them. In this agentic era, AI systems don’t just wait for inputs - they analyse behavioural signals, anticipate intent, determine the most appropriate next step in the customer journey, and they take actions.

To make this possible, enterprises need more than intelligent models. They need a tight, continuous connection between customer data and engagement execution.

At Tata Communications, our composable CDP plays a critical role in enabling this shift by working as a part of our AI Operating System (AI OS). The AI OS is not a model, or a chatbot, or an execution layer - it is a governed stack connecting enterprise reality to AI execution. As part of the AI OS, the CDP unifies behavioural, transactional, and interaction signals (the context layer) into a real time understanding of the customer, while other layers determine how those insights are translated into intelligent orchestration, through agents and humans; driving action across channels and systems.

This enables several agentic capabilities that are redefining modern communication strategies:

• AI-driven journey orchestration, where engagement dynamically adapts based on live customer behaviour rather than predefined flows
• Predictive next-best action models that guide more relevant and timely interactions at each stage of the lifecycle
• Autonomous optimisation of messaging and engagement that continuously improves performance across channels without manual intervention
• Real time sentiment and behavioural analysis that adjusts interactions as customer intent and emotion evolve.

The objective, however, is not automation for its own sake - it is intelligent and responsible autonomy. While AI can initiate, optimise, and scale engagement, enterprises retain the governance, visibility, and control required to operate safely and confidently, particularly in regulated and high-trust environments.

As AI becomes more agentic, organisations will increasingly depend on connected customer data and AI-driven orchestration to deliver proactive, personalised experiences across conversational, commerce, and service journeys. The organisations to succeed will be those that treat agentic AI not as a tool, but as a coordinated system grounded in data, guided by policy, and aligned to real business outcomes.

Tata Communications is a leading digital ecosystem provider that powers today’s fast-growing digital economy. The company enables the digital transformation of enterprises globally, including 300 of the Fortune 500; unlocking opportunities for businesses by enabling borderless growth, boosting product innovation and customer experience, improving productivity and efficiency, building agility, and managing risk.

With its solutions-orientated approach, proven managed service capabilities, and cutting-edge infrastructure, Tata Communications drives the next level of intelligence with its cloud, mobility, Internet of Things, collaboration, security, and network services.

Tata Communications is part of the rich heritage of the Internet in India. Over the last 25 years, its enterprise-enabled services have been essential to the adoption of digital services in the country. From utility to transformation, connectivity is an essential fabric of sustenance for the economy.

For more information on Tata Communications' Kaleyra.ai, please visit the website. You can also connect with Gaurav on LinkedIn.