Episode released on: 28. November 2022
Human interactions have evolved… so should your contact centre! with Anand Janefalkar Founder & CEO UJET – E102 – CX GOALKEEPER – Customer Experience Goals
The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Anand Janefalkar
LinkedIn Headline: Founder & CEO at UJET
Highlights:
- 00:00 Game Start
- 00:53 Anand’s intro
- 02:23 Anand’s values
- 04:55 UJET.cx
- 11:07 human interaction has evolved. So Should your contact center
- 12:44 Proactive Services
- 16:11 The role of Cloud
- 23:35 The Future of CX
- 25:58 Anand’s book suggestion
- 27:17 Anand’s contact details
- 27:29 Anand’s Golden Nugget
and much more
Anand’s Contact Details:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/anandjanefalkar/
- https://ujet.cx/
- anand AT ujet dot CX
His book suggestion:
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Robert Bach
Anand’s Golden Nuggets:
- Humans are very, very important. We always believe “bank on people more than bank on anything else”. Problems in technology, a lot of times are human problems and not technical problems. So get the right set of people together and get alignment, make sure that you have a good working relationship that is void of just impulsive behavior or egos. And then you can solve any difficult problem. That’s something that we live by and hopefully that is it just reiterate something that people believe in themselves.
“Get the right set of people together and get alignment, make sure that you have a good working relationship that is void of just impulsive behavior or egos. And then you can solve any difficult problem” Anand J. CEO @ujetcx on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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Gregorio Uglioni
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast your host, Greg will have smart discussions with friends, experts and thought leaders on customer experience transformation and leadership. Please follow this podcast on your preferred platform. I am sure you will enjoy the next episode with the guest I selected for you.
Gregorio Uglioni
Ladies and gentleman tonight. It’s really a big pleasure because I have Anand from UJET.cx together with me. Hi Anand, howe are you?.
Anand Janefalkar
Good, and how are you?
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I am really happy because I will have a nice discussion together with you deep diving about customer experience and everything about human interactions with you. And therefore it’s really, really a pleasure for me to have you on the C CX goalkeeper podcast. Thank you very much for your time,
Anand Janefalkar
First the pleasures mine.
Gregorio Uglioni
Let’s really kick off and we started this game, as usual with a usual question it means Anand could you please introduce yourself?
Anand Janefalkar
Yeah, sure. So hello, everyone. My name is Anand Janefalkar, and I’m the founder and CEO for ujet.cx. Basically, quick overview of UJET. What before UJET, my background is from the the consumer world with experience in mobile handsets, smartphones operating systems than wireless cloud, which means the advent of 3g, 4g, and the trajectory of that which makes the data ubiquitous and great bandwidth for consumers. So how did that transition to customer experience happen? Well, what I figured out is the only time to humans don’t communicate visually and contextually, since the advent of the smartphones is on a support conversation, whether it’s voice chat, SMS does not really matter. It is a very incongruent with what our interaction mechanisms are with our friends and family, where we tend to share photos, video, screenshots, location, API, so on and so forth, while having a interaction or conversation that just simply does not have the customer experience or customer support whenever a company or a company’s representative is interacting with its current or potential customers. And that was something that felt needed to change. And that was the start of UJET. And that was seven years ago.
Gregorio Uglioni
thank you very much. I think this is a great introduction. And you are already explaining what what ujet is doing. Before deep diving in this outstanding product, perhaps one question to learn a bit more about you, which values drive you live.
Anand Janefalkar
So as you can tell, from the very beginning, it was user experience, that was a motivation. I always felt that there was something magical about connecting to humans or getting them to communicate easier. That drove my journey through my professional upbringing, and not just education and research, but also through the products and brands that worked at Nokia Research Center, Motorola Mobility, jawbone, all of those are kind of stepping stones towards my professional upbringing, that communication becomes easier and effortless. And as you as you can imagine, the natural evolution of communication is to interact with someone is right in front of you, you use their hand gestures, you use your body language, you kind of changed the way you you speak or your your annotations with your eyes, your and so on and so forth. Those are very important as very soft impulses stimuli for people to have an effective communication. So that is, has been continually the motivation and journey. And to make that effortless with technology are disappearing in the background. So this is just a the next step towards that because it’s extremely important for companies and brands to communicate with their audience in a very effective manner. And more importantly, what they expect today in their normal day to day digital interactions. If you really think about it, the company’s representatives or the customer support professionals, technical support, the tier volunteer two, tier three, all of these are young professionals that are just basically living their lives using the smartphone as their portal to the information universe. When they get into a support conversation. They almost have to bring their senses down and communicated in the unit dimensional perspective. So it was very important to ensure that what the motivation and journey has been for me gets extrapolated to this important interaction between companies and their target audience.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And I think this is the best possible introduction also To the main discussion that we will have today, it’s really about human interactions, and our should contact center evolve in future or now, because now it’s time to change, and therefore really kicking off the discussion about ujet.cx. Why did you decide to start ujet?
Anand Janefalkar
Right. So like I was alluding to before, there was something very, very distinctly different with how you see people communicate visually and contextually in their everyday lives with friends and family, and how the two humans communicate on a support conversation. Also, I alluded to these young professionals that are the brand ambassadors for companies that are communicating with their target audience. They are also very, very digitally acquainted. And they almost have to change their interaction model almost park their sensory abilities in a sense, and then communicate on a voice call or a chat call. It’s because the underlying tooling has been very antiquated. But then, if you also think about these people during their trainings, what one of the things that was the motivation of building NuGet, the way that we did is that the training period for the agents is very painful. And the it’s like, okay, don’t use your smartphone, use only this particular program on the computer. All of these aps that you kind of take for granted in your day to day life, don’t think about those because those are not available. AI is kind of a almost just a catchphrase, and not really implemented in the solutions. So wanting to completely transform that wanted to transform that when the two individuals at the endpoints of this interaction are utilizing devices like a smartphone and a very capable computer, there is no limitation on the communication pathways that they can have. They could do voice chat, anything, screenshots, error codes, battery level information transfer, all that together in the same medium. However, the pipe that’s connecting those two was extremely obsolete. So wanted to build an end to end platform as opposed to just a stopgap feature. And that’s what we did. And the motivation was that to completely replace what the smart connection is between these two smart devices or smart computers, and we feel that we have been able to do that, because when we see our clients utilize the usual platform with their target customers, the customer satisfaction scores are are shooting up at least 30%. And the interaction time is getting reduced by over 40 to 50%. I’ve never met any individual that says like, oh, no, I, I hate that my resolution was done in half the time people want things faster, right? We never go for, okay, let me find out what the slower car is. And I’ll go for that. We never say like, okay, it will this appointment take at least an hour, then I mean, not 15 minutes. So just naturally, we are in a little bit of a rush, because we want to make time for things that are important friends and family, as well as other passions that we have. So making sure that the first touch resolution happens in a very short time, was also a motivation to design the huge platform that we did.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you so much. And I had the pleasure already to speak with your team. And I really was positive super surprised, by the way that you were explaining that and your team is explaining that because the reality is we are using a smartphone. And we are for for us, it’s common to a video chat to write in WhatsApp, and then to switch here and there and sending information. And then you go into the contact center, and everything is split, you need to do voice on this tool, you need to chat on that tool and you don’t get the information all together. And therefore I was really, it was an outstanding presentation saying oh, that’s the reality. And it explained in a very simple way if we could give to the contact center agents, smartphones doing everything what they are doing, they will be empowered to create to create smart connection together with with their customer.
Anand Janefalkar
think and you brought up another good point is were short for the agents and customer support representatives, the the wellness administrators as well as the financial assessors and appraisers. For them. The reason and they have these different tools is because it is not all coming back together in their case management system or their customer record management system. So one of the things that we do is that as an agent, you don’t have to go ahead after the call or chat or SMS is done and say like, oh, I asked this person to send a photo over email because I wanted to get their invoice where If occation and they’ve needed to send a picture, and then after call work or after session work requires them to merge that ticket with their phone ticket or their SMS ticket. So that is why sometimes when you call back, they’re like, Okay, we can’t find your interaction before, because this is a manual process and think about how many of these conversations the agents are having, they don’t really have time to accurately do something that they have done. Because there’s different calls that are coming in different chats are coming in, and their supervisors pounding on their door, saying, like, hey, you need to get through these 20 to 30 calls a day 15 call after work periods and that have dispositions attached to them. So making all of that process, not just in the live interaction, but the follow up to that live interaction, so that the back office flow is seamless, was extremely important to us. And that is one of the things that we see is very, very important, impactful for an organization so that not just the customer is taken care of in real time. But the actual follow up actions do not require them to like go through 10 different windows and figuring out how does this get to resolution?
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And I think you summarized also what you are saying in a very smart way. I read because I don’t want to make mistakes, human interaction has evolved. So Should your contact center? Could you quickly elaborate on that? I know you explained a lot. But I think this is really the key of this discussion.
Anand Janefalkar
Yeah, a simple example is like, let’s say you and I become friends. And we are one of our shared passions is either sports or drones, right. And so I buy a new drone, which is in limited supply, and then I’m excited to share that with you. So I might call you, you’re busy doing a podcast, so you don’t answer my call. So I’ll follow up with a text with a possible video of the first flight of the drone. That is how human interaction is today, between friends and family. Imagine if this was a conversation with a customer experience team, you would contact them that, hey, I bought this drone, but I’m unable to connect it over Bluetooth, I’m unable to connect it with my smartphone, there are issues syncing it or the camera feed is not coming through, because I’m not able to even connect the Wi Fi. These things you won’t be able to call them and then attach a video or attach a error code to that which you can do in everyday normal human interaction. So bridging that gap, making it just second nature to communicate with the company or the company’s brand ambassador, or the company’s representative in the same manner that you would normally connect is what we enable.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. And I think this example make it really simple to understand. And let’s say effortless and next to being creating this easy services, good service for customer, we are often speaking about being proactive, and this will be able to see in future a game changer. Could you please elaborate a bit on that?
Anand Janefalkar
Yeah, so proactiveness is very important. Because a lot of times, if you think about it, we are as companies, right, or any brand, we are pushing product, or we’re making products enticing, that customers don’t really completely understand how they can utilize to make their lives better. So when you’re getting into that mechanism, you really need to be proactive in not just pushing to sell the product, but making that product use effective for once the sale is done. And that is similar in customer experience as well. So being proactive, understanding the simple triggers, like if you are spending time on my webpage, where I’m elaborating the different things that you can do with the product, and you’re you’re coming back and clicking on a couple of things on the unit help or you’re looking at the user guide, that is a trigger enough to proactively pop up a chat window and say like, Hey, do you need help on this particular thing? And it doesn’t have to be done only when you need to make a sale, right? Because the reality is, is if you are able to effectively get your customer to use your product, it creates brand loyalty, very effectively able to solve their problems and have a successful customer support call you have very likely repeat business for for them and they’re worth 10x Usually, or at least 8x. Usually off what do you spend to acquire a new customer? Not saying you shouldn’t do that, but you should do both. Because what happens if you’re only targeting new customers is that your churn kind of really depletes all of the metrics that you’re going for by new customer acquisition. So where I’m going with this is that the proactiveness of just seeing the simple triggers, and then enabling AI to ask if Hey, I’ve seen you visit this website I’ve seen you click on this looks like after two or three days, you’re still going through the same stuff. word self serve. And here is a connection with a financial advisor, if you’d like, here’s a connection with a technical expert to if you’re having Wi Fi issues, what that does is it shows that you care for your customer beyond the sale. And that is a very effective way to create brand loyalty. Furthermore, if you take this into the back office operations, how agents, administrators and all those communicate, taking that AI aspect of it, just having a automatic machine learning based review of these are the customer satisfaction scores. These are the different call times and chat times and wait times. These are the trends that we see during, let’s say, peak hour before during lunch hour or right after five o’clock when people are probably calling in while they’re driving home. These are the things that can be used as inputs towards making them better. So utilizing proactiveness and AI, not just at the front end of the equation, but also at the back end is something that we are strong believers in.
Gregorio Uglioni
And I think what you’re saying it totally makes sense. You touch the topic AI quickly back on the on the being proactive. I think what you’re saying it totally makes sense. I’m coming from a credit card company. And we had all we discussed always, if we as a credit card company are blocking the cards of our customers because of fraudster because of this or that, why not contacting them and telling them proactively pay attention. There was a fraud case or pay attention, you forgot to pay your bill, please pay your bill. And then we can you can use the card again. And I think this is really a game changer because then people feel cared about because I am proactively contacting them. Not now you’re you’re touching the topic AI and I think this is one key topic. But I know that you are also an expert about cloud computing. And a lot of people think about that cloud is a new technology or a new buzzword that we should use. But we all agree or at least we agree that it’s business model transformation. And can you please expand a bit more on this concept speaking also thinking about a CX executive?
Anand Janefalkar
Yeah. So Cloud, to me is something that is very native to my professional journey. With all the transitions from going from, that’s a push button phones all the way to smartphones and tablets and Bluetooth speakers and IoT devices, right? So we live in an age in a world today, where information is readily available, and it is available anywhere, because the connection points between what are your gateway to the information highway, the smartphone, or even even if it’s not a smartphone, even if it’s a feature phone, it does still have that capability. Most of your tablets, most of your computers that you’re likely carrying around, has that capability. So there is no emphasis really on, okay, this is the work you did and then save a copy on it on your local machine. And then make sure that you’re uploading something somewhere else. So that you’re, you have access to it. If let’s say you’re on the move, and you’re trying to access it well sitting in the chair of a underground metro, those, we don’t have those conversations because that’s automatic to us. Fast forward, what happens after you get off that Metro and go into your office, a lot of times the information if you’re on a system that is an on prem system that is only available when you have that connection point, this has nothing to do about security. A lot of times the naysayers will say like oh, but this is secure and all that you can enable security with VPN with encryption with the secure key exchanges, both private and public, so that you can have those transitions. Pat’s have very, very properly curated for for any kind of privacy and security procedures. But continuing on that example that you’re going and you can only access that information while you’re you’re at this particular building. What that does, it breaks the entire way that people want to work today. Right, even before the pandemic of working from different sites are working if you’re in the global economy. Almost every recognizable brand has presence in multiple multiple countries, that itself enables the need for having a cloud computing solution. And having a solution which the it doesn’t matter where you’re connecting to what your sort of source of truth or your databases or your application toolkit is. So after the pandemic, this got even more exacerbated because you just couldn’t really go on to your office or your on prem there certain There’s a lot of restrictions that were. And there were things that people really needed to do to take care of themselves and not get exposed to because they might also have their family and their elderly and their family in, in danger. So what that did is it took cloud, or the transition from on prem to cloud from being a checkbox as an experiment, or a checkbox as a business continuity practice to actual reality. Now, some of this was done very impulsively. Some of this was done very half heartedly, just because time was not available when that transition needed to happen and business continuity being preserved. But what Today we’re in as we were, hopefully, at the very tail end, if not past the, the worst part of the pandemic. Now, people should think about executives and customer experience professionals should think about the transition that we did, then if it is still the same today. Is that future proof? Is that how we would have wanted to architect that? Yes, we did what we needed to do, because we just needed to keep the lights on. But is it the same thing that we need to do for enhancing our business operations going forward? So asking that question, I think is the first step towards proper cloud transformation, and not just a reactive change that you did a couple of years ago. And then what quickly people will realize is that there’s several different functions that you need to do their security will be one part of it, we are proud to always say that we had sock two type two security, even before we had a website. And we continued on that path. And today, we ensure that the content one of the conversations we have with the companies that we work with is with the the InfoSec team or with the Chief Information Security Officer and getting them comfortable, get them to really embrace that trading security for Cloud is is really not an option, or it shouldn’t be an option, it comes hand in hand. Because you cannot jeopardize your operations just because you’re making a transformation on your, your toolkit or your IT systems. where I’m going with that is that is that that first step is extremely important. And you really need to identify yourself or someone in your team that you trust as the champion for that cloud transformation. And furthermore, taking that so that you could enable those conversations, those interactions with your customers.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I would have now given that question that I would have, but the taking care of the time the last question that I have also on this topic. Basically, I have a CEO shaping the future of the contact center here with me. And therefore I would like to ask this question, what do you foresee in the future of customer experience, for example, in 10 years from now
Anand Janefalkar
10 years is a long time. But hopefully in the next three to four years, we will be at a point where we get customer support, not as customer support, because customer support sometimes is just considered as a checkbox or as a necessary evil. I think customer support will become customer experience, which will be a part of the multi experience, world that we are hopefully about to enter, you are using connection points to access your service, right? We no longer feel that the channels are as important as they were 1015 years ago, channels were channels because they were device limitations, right? Your landline could only do voice, your pager could only do text, your website on your computer could do chat, but it couldn’t do chat on your mobile website. All of those limitations are gone. So channels are really, really obsolete. Now. What we believe in is what is the multi experience? What are the connection points. So the connection points are largely the the app that you utilize with your smartphone or your computer, right, you’re you’re trying to interact with a brand or service through a website, you’re trying to interact with the brand or service through their app, or you simply since you’re from a credit card company, you’re just looking at the back of your card and calling that number. But just because you are calling that number that’s printed on the back of your credit card or the box of a product that you bought does not mean it shouldn’t be limited to that channel. What that can do. One of the things that we strongly believe in is SMS as a enabler for multi experience. So that phone number that you’re we’ve seen that 98.5% of the time when people are calling in even in that mechanism. They’re calling in from a SMS capable device, if not 100% of the time. But they’re calling in from that SMS capable device doesn’t even have to be smartphones. It is a camera enabled device, even if it’s a feature phone that has SMS. So enable that multi experience. When you see that someone’s selecting an option and out here and reaching out, because I’m having an issue with my product or service, you immediately know that you can effectively solve that with visual and contextual information as opposed to just a uni dimensional analog voice vector. So enabling that is the first step. And hopefully in three or four years, this becomes just very matter of fact, it’s like, yeah, Greg communicated with this particular brand. They already knew that he had spent time on their websites that they didn’t offer him a self. Have you tried ourselves, sir, while you wait for it? They didn’t make him wait on the car. Because they said like, Hey, we’ve, you can more effectively get this, if you start a conversation with chat and video embedded in it, and you steer them towards that multi experience. I think that is where the world is going. And I’m excited that we are hopefully, trailblazing that path for the companies
Gregorio Uglioni
where you were interesting. And I think we already have a topic for the next podcast together with you multi experience. But now let’s conclude this first game together with you. And three short question in the last three minutes of this podcast. The first question is, is there a book that you would suggest to the audience that helped you during your career or during your life?
Anand Janefalkar
Well, that’s a tough question. There’s the one book that maybe immediately comes to mind, I think I’m getting you’re gonna get the name correct is, is, I believe the name of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was, which is a book that sharks out. I think it’s by Robert Bach, it is the journey of a seagull on how they developed the their skills of not just being aware of flying, which should be very inherent, but flying fast, and continuing to embark on their journey to fly faster, and hopefully safer. I think that was as someone that is absolutely obsessed with speed, both in business and very impatient. That book was definitely one that I felt was supremely impactful.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. The best way to contact you?
Unknown Speaker
is through our website and my email. It’s very simple anand AT ujet dot CX
Gregorio Uglioni
And now we are coming to the last question. And and this is another golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience.
Anand Janefalkar
Yes. So I strongly feel that this has shaped my journey in life. That it it, humans are very, very important, right? We always believe that bank on people more than bank on anything else. And problems in technology, a lot of times are human problems and not technical problems. So get the right set of people together and get alignment, make sure that you have a good working relationship that is void of just impulsive behavior or egos. And then you can solve any any difficult problem. That’s something that we live by and hopefully that is it just reiterate something that people believe in themselves.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. The only thing that I can say is thank you very much for your time. I really enjoy seeing the growth part of ujet.cx It’s really an outstanding product. Thank you very much for your time.
Anand Janefalkar
Thank you for having me.
Gregorio Uglioni
And also to the audience. It was a pleasure that you followed this discussion. We are always happy to get feedback please contact me or the anon director is team if you have any question related to ujet Dotty extent you very much. Have a nice evening. Bye bye.
Gregorio Uglioni
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it a word of mouth, subscribe it, share it until the next episode. Please don’t forget, we are not in a b2b or b2c business. We are in a human to human environment. Thank you
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