140: The Benefits of CX Automated Platforms : A Frictionless Experience with Mahesh Ram

Navigating the Customer Experience

Mahesh Ram is a serial founder and entrepreneur and he's currently the founding CEO of Solvvy, a leading SaaS provider of conversational self-service and automation solutions to leading global companies with over 550 million end users. Prior to Solvvy, he was the CEO of GlobalEnglish which pioneered online business English education for learners in over 120 countries. GlobalEnglish was later acquired by the Pearson PLC. He previously held CTO roles at Thomson Reuters.

Questions

• Could you just tell us a little bit about your journey? How it is that you ended up in this world of customer experience automation?
• Can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy?
• So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?
• A business is really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?
• Could you share with us what is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had really great impact on you, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it still has a great impact on you.
• Could you share also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, because it kind of helps to get you back on track, or just get you going if you get derailed for any reason? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Mahesh’s Journey

Mahesh shared that he thinks the whole area of customer experience is one that always fascinated him, his entire career has been about automating complexity. And by taking very complex things and turning them into easier, better, more frictionless experiences and that's been true for whether that's online education or legal and tax compliance. But when he thinks about customer experience, it's the thing that impacts every single one of us, all of us have great experiences we can talk about with brands and we have those very poor experiences we talk about with brands and we make decisions based on those things. And he’s no different than everybody else, than their customers.

And so, when he saw the potential for the technology to truly deliver a better experience at scale, he was hooked. When he saw that the incredibly powerful PhD work that his co-founders had done that enabled the ability to deliver this incredible customer experience at scale, he just couldn't resist because as a CEO, he has often seen that they're just not good enough at this. So that's what motivated him and that's what excites him about what they're doing.

What is Solvvy About?

Me: All right. So can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy? I know you mentioned in your bio that you are currently at Solvvy and Solvvy is about CX automated platforms and basically powering customer experiences. Just in in real word terms so our listeners that are listening, whether they are managers, or business owners of small or medium businesses, they can get a better understanding of what you do could possibly influence what they do to enhance frictionless experiences for their customers.

Mahesh shared that there's a famous book called The Effortless Experience that he thinks described very nicely what they're trying to do, but at Solvvy, they built a powerful SaaS platform, it's a solution that takes machine learning and natural language processing, natural language understanding at its core, but delivers an end user or consumer experience that allows every one of us as consumers to interact with the brand in a way to get self-service automation sometimes, other times get the right journey, be able to get to the right agent at the right time. But the way they like to think about it is allowing any brand in the world at scale to deliver what they think of is like concierge level journey. Imagine if the system understood you, it knows what you want, you just talked to it and it tells you where you need to go. Sometimes it provides you an immediate answer, other times it has to ask you some follow up questions because it needs a little more information from you in order to pinpoint either the right answer or get you to the right agent.

And you can imagine how this can be scaled across a global footprint, across the world. Their customers are B2B and B2C companies that have hundreds and millions of end users. But they’re serving two customers, if you will, they're serving the companies that buy and implement them but ultimately, their end customer is their consumer, their end user and can they (Solvvy) deliver an intelligent solution like sometimes it's in the form of a chatbot, other times it's in the form of taking them on a journey and taking them to the right agent. But that's what they do. They made it really simple to implement something that's very complex under the hood, but it's very simple for companies to implement and it delivers an immediate ROI to the business and better experience for the user.

Me: Does your company primarily work with a particular type of industry like retail? Or is it more service based kind of organizations? Could you give an example of maybe one of your clients that has seen success as a result of this approach?

Mahesh shared that first of all they work across a wide number of verticals, both B2B and B2C. But he would say some of their strongest verticals are things like ecommerce, not so much pure physical retail, but oftentimes the ecommerce arm of a retail business, FinTech. So consumer FinTech and banking, a good example would be a consumer finance banking application stash, which many people have used, millions of users use them. They work with brands like Ring - the home doorbell, home alarm, home security company, which is now part of Amazon. These are some of the companies. So it's a wide spectrum of companies but typically it's a situation where he as an end user of a product or service, have adopted that product or service, but have questions about how to get the most out of it. And sometimes that can be simple, that can be he’s an ecommerce customer and he has ordered something and he wants to cancel something or he wants to see where it is, he’s wondering why there's a delay.

Other times, it might be something like he bought a device and he doesn't know how to make it work with his iPhone, we've all had that experience. And in both those situations, Solvvy can understand the issue as expressed by the user in everyday natural language, and then be able to connect the user to the right solution that could be a stepwise guide an answer, it could be in some cases, collecting more information and giving it to the agent who can then help you 3 to 10 times faster than they could. So that those are some examples of companies they work with, that it's a pretty broad spectrum. They even work in healthcare, they work with Calm, which is one of the leading meditation apps, many of your users, entrepreneurs may be using that to do meditation and peace of mind. Wonderful application, they support their end users. So it ranges across a wide range of industries.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Me: So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing. And I know for the average person, that may sound like really high level, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?

Mahesh shared that the way to simplify the complex, obviously, natural language processing is a deep science and there's 10s of 1000s of research papers and PhD thesis on this, but he'll simplify it because he thinks at the end of the day, as consumers, it boils down to one thing is the ability to understand, in the customer experience space, it's the ability to understand when a user expresses an issue or what we think of as an intent.

So, you might say, “I bought the jeans last week, they don't fit me, please help.” And if you have enough data about prior examples of that, you can quickly learn, the machine learning can actually learn that the natural language expression in that case is likely a call to say, “Hey, can I return or exchange this?” Nowhere is the word return or exchange used. So he thinks natural language understanding in context of customer experience is about understanding how people in that business or in that problem area express issues, they often don't use the words that the companies use, they may not use the word return or exchange, they say, “I want to give this back.”

So NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is the technology that allows you to move away from that kind of keyword dependency and understand the core intent of what the user is doing.

And the way you do that is you actually train on the prior data, because chances are most businesses have had 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people asking similar questions before. And the machine learning can actually learn how real users express real issues and start to get better at detecting that as soon as they finish typing something in or speaking something.

And we're all familiar with Alexa, and it has a specific set of natural language understanding where you can ask what's the weather and it's been trained to understand those words, is it going to rain today? And it knows to answer you with an answer and tell you to take an umbrella. So that's an example of NLU that most people would understand but in the context of customer experience, it's very much about understanding that businesses specific natural language.

Tips for Implementing Automation in Your Business

Me: So let's say we have some listeners who their business, let me give you an example. Let's say for example, it is a pastry business and she or he may have an outlet where customers can come and pick up little pastries like cupcakes or a slice of bread pudding or whatever the case is. And they're really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?

Mahesh stated that he thinks the first thing he thinks if you think about foundational principles, it's first of all, let's make sure that we collect all that information in a place where you make sure that you answer it, that you keep track of it, that you have some history of what's happened with that user.

And so typically, you would use some sort of a simple support CRM business. They partner with companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and others. And those are pretty simple to implement, they don't really require a lot of deep technology to implement a simple implementation.

And that allows you to then say, “Okay, Yanique called me on Tuesday asking about the status of her pastry order. And I need to get back to her.” It keeps track of it and if you come back a week later, he might know that you asked about this last week. And so, he might start his conversation with you by saying, “Is this about the pastry order you placed last week?”, So he has some context.

So he thinks first thing is to put a simple system in place, there's lightweight systems, there's inexpensive systems, they don't cost a lot of money. And typically, you can scale up or down depending on how many resources you have. So that, he thinks is first things first.

Second thing is, he thinks a lot of businesses would just benefit from writing some simple content, and other things on their websites to be able to answer the most frequently asked questions. So pay attention, once you're starting to track what people are asking, you should then be able to go back and say, let me write an article about how do I customize a cake. Or if I order a bulk order of pastries, do I get a discount? These might be common questions that you see in the data that you see, after you see this is coming up over and over. So that would be like a starting point, you'd start with some sort of a knowledge base so people can find the answer for themselves because most people don't want to wait for your team, especially if you have a small team, it might take 24 hours for you to answer that question about a bulk order, well, you might have lost the order by that time.

So you're better off letting the customer get the help they need. And that goes to the third thing, which is then the third thing is they work with OpenTable. You're familiar with OpenTable, people make reservations at any restaurant, hundreds of 1000s of restaurants around the world. And they serve two audiences, as a consumer if you want to book a table at a fancy restaurant, perhaps in San Francisco, but also the restaurant owner who has to then control some of those back end tools. And they provide a whole range of tools.

But imagine an experience where that restaurant owner can interact with technology to be able to change their hours or modify frequently asked questions. So, that's where they often come in is that they end up giving brands a way to automate even more complex things.

So if you say, “Hey, I want to customize my cake.” the Natural Language Understanding can actually understand that or maybe you don't say customized, “I want to order a special cake for my niece. And I want it to say something very unique.” Something like that and nowhere would he use the word customized. I could come up to you and say, “Great, looks like you want to customize the cake. We have these options for you, which one do you want.”

And take you down the path and actually collect all that information and say, “I've got everything I need, somebody will get back to you within an hour with an ETA on when this cake will be ready for you. Does that make sense?”

And imagine that experience in 35-40 seconds, he might have actually gotten your order right. And he’ll still handed off to a human being because somebody still has to bake the cake. But at that point, he’s such a delighted consumer that maybe he’ll order a little extra. Maybe at that point, you present him with an offer and say, “If you want to order a dozen cookies for the other guests, there's a special offer 10% off right now.” So he thinks if you think about automation, it's not about putting a blocker in front of the user, it's about automating things that otherwise they'd have to wait too long for.

App, Website or Tool that Mahesh Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Mahesh stated that that's a great question. He thinks for them, because they've gone completely virtual right due to the pandemic, so everybody's virtual. So he thinks it would be tempting to say an online meeting tool like Zoom. But he actually thinks that the most indispensable tool is probably something like Slack because it's a communication vehicle for everyone to share information and ideas.

And what they've done which is nice with Slack is they've used some of the third party bots and applications inside Slack to do things like give praise to someone. It makes it easy to give praise and it shows up in Slack, everyone can read it, it also then writes it automatically to the performance management system. So it's a great way to motivate your employees or help people motivate one another for great work, “Hey, Yanique did a great job today on this, she made it possible for me to help this customer.”

It makes it easy to just go into Slack and give her praise. That's one example. You can share documents; you can even do video calls in Slack. So, it's a pretty powerful tool, he’s sure other people use other things like it. But that's one that he would say it's been very, very crucial for them.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mahesh

When asked about books that had a great impact, Mahesh shared that one book is very personal. His grandfather lived in India, grew up in India, he had spent most of his career in the public service. But he's very interested in music and after the age of about 60, he decided to become a music and dance critic. And he started writing and then actually became a well-known critic and musicologist in one of the major newspapers of India.

And at the age of 88, his grandfather decided to write a book. He wrote a book on music and musicians and just his recollections and opinions. And it turned out to be a really, really well received book and got a lot of critical praise at the age of 88. He thinks that to him, it was less about the book and more about the fact that his lifelong passion for learning had never stopped. And so, it's as much the book as the writing of the book as the book itself, it's both. So that was one.

The second one, which he thinks has become more and more relevant as a book he has probably read three times. It's a three volume, very heavy, long trilogy called Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, written by a man named Taylor Branch, and it's kind of the entire lifespan of Martin Luther King and it's probably about 2000 pages total.

So it's not light reading. But it talks about all of the ups and downs of the civil rights movement, the great triumphs, and then of course, later in his life some of his regrets and so on, and so on. And he thinks it really comes home when you think about the events of the last couple of years and what's going on in the world, you realize that these struggles, the great struggles don't have easy answers and solutions don't just emerge and everything is great.

Things have a way of taking far longer and being much more difficult than you ever imagined when you started. Ideals are what carry you through but even, there's a lot of frustration you have to overcome whether that through in business or in social life. So those are two. And then for fun, he thinks one that he always like reading, it’s light reading is Calvin and Hobbes a cartoon strip, because he just thinks it reminds him that at the end of the day, we all take ourselves way too seriously.

Me: That's so true. And life is so short, we really have to enjoy laughter.

What Mahesh is Really Excited About Now!

Mahesh shared that they're working on so many incredibly exciting things in the business. He'll choose one or two that he thinks excites him the most. The first thing is what he calls the Omni-Channel experience. Take the example of the pastry shop, he thinks they're just now entering in the United States, the notion of a truly omni-channel experience where businesses have to meet consumers where they live.

It's no longer reasonable to expect customers to come to your website. They live in Instagram, they live in Snapchat, they live in WhatsApp and this has already happened in other markets like in China, you have WeChat and India WhatsApp is very, very strong. And if he wants to order a pizza from Domino's in India, he’s just as likely to use WhatsApp as I am to go to www.dominos.com.

But in North America, that's just now happening, it's just happening where brands have to be creating really strong presence but the problem is there isn't one thing. It isn't like he can just build for WhatsApp, on a Monday, he might choose to interact with the pastry shop mentioned on Facebook Messenger. On Tuesday, he might want to go into WhatsApp and place an order for a cake. On Wednesday, he might go to the store brand to the website and try to order it. And it could change if two users might have two different things.

So brands have to be in all these places. But he can't have different things going on in those sites. If he asked you what's the price to customize the cake, and you give him three different answers on three different channels, that's a real problem, consumers get really annoyed.

So he thinks what they're doing at Solvvy, which is really exciting, is they're making it possible for businesses to build the intelligent layer once in the platform, and then deliver on any of these channels they choose with the same consistency. So if you come in on a Monday and say, “I want to return the shoes that I bought on Facebook Messenger.” They’ll take you through that entire experience and get to get it returned and connect you to an agent. But on Wednesday, you come back and ask “Where's my order on the company's website?” They'll be able to answer that question just as accurately on that thing. So the consistency across platforms.

So it's consistent and personalized so it knows enough to ask Yanique for her email address and look it up and tell you exactly where your order is, that kind of personalization automated is critical.

And then he thinks that goes to the second piece, which is what excites him more than anything is the ability to deliver a truly personalized experience. Think about yourself or anybody in the audience, when you buy a product or service, the experience you have in the first week, maybe the first 10 days, maybe the first 30 days, if it's a piece of software is so crucial. How well you use it, how well you get acclimated to it, determines how happy you are with it. So they think at Solvvy, how do they enable brands to be able to deliver that kind of support and on boarding and guidance to say a first 30-day user, it's different than for a user who has been with the brand for 6 to 12 months and do that at scale, do that for millions of people.

So a good example would be they work with a very large meal kit delivery service, they deliver meals to your home. And he can deliver a different experience for someone who's ordering their very first meal, that's a little bit more hand holding, a little bit more like, “Hey, did everything come as you expected?” Because they're not used to some of the things about unpacking the ice and doing these things. But if somebody who ordered 12 meals in the last 2 months, he probably don't want to waste their time asking them if they know how to unpack the ice, he wants to ask them if they're looking for new recipes.

So the ability to do that at a massive scale, because you can't do that one by one, but technology allows you to say, I'm going to do that for everybody who's a first 30-day user is going to get this experience. So those are the kinds of things, so personalization and omni-channel are the two things that he thinks really, really excites him about the business.

Me: Two things came to mind when you were speaking just now. So the first thing you mentioned was omni-channel and I personally as a customer, I'm trying to wonder if there's no technology out there that let's say, for example, utilities is something we all have to pay every month, let's say our electricity bills, and you may talk to your electricity company, you may not talk to them very often, but there are times when you do have to interface with them. So let's say for example, you reach out to them on Twitter messenger because there was a power outage in your area and they communicated and said, okay, they've sent their engineers to sort it out and we should get service restored within X amount of time. And then four months later, you may need to contact them because you're trying to pay a bill, you're trying to use their platform to pay the bill, but you're having some challenges and when you call them on the phone, you can't get them, it would be good to know that they're able to connect those experiences. So they would say to you, “Oh, hi, Miss Grant, we haven't heard from you in four months, how have things been?” Because then it shows that they're paying attention to the last time someone was in contact with you, even if it wasn't the same agent that you dealt with four months ago. Is that possible?

Mahesh shared that it's not only possible, they're doing that all the time. There's kind of a divide in the middle, which is whether I know who you are, I don't right. Oftentimes, if you're going to an ecommerce site, you go to www.nike.com, you're probably not identifying yourself, and you may not want to identify yourself, you may not want them to know that it's Yanique.

But if you have an existing relationship with the brand, you still might come to the website of the utility company and not identify yourself but based on the type of question you're asking, they might say, “In order to help you, you'll have to identify yourself.” But he doesn't want to give that to you until he realizes you need that.

So, then he might say, “Can you please tell me the email address or can you log in?” And then based on the login, now he can come back and say, “Looks like you came in last week and asked this question. Are you asking about the same thing?”

And if you say no, then he can pop up and give you the more generic menus and say, “Hey, would you like to be able to do it?” So not only is it possible, they're doing it all the time with brands where they're personalizing the experience, this goes back to his notion of personalization is that sure it can understand prior interaction data and ask you if that's the case. Sometimes that can be intrusive, you may not care about something four months ago, it's not that.

But if you've called three times in the last week, chances are it’s about the same issue.

And so at that point, what he needs to do is two things. One is he needs to make sure that every single thing that you told him on the first call or the first technology interaction with Solvvy, for example, it's been recorded properly to the agent, so that the next agent picks who it up, your second call a week later has everything in front of them and that's the key.

The key is not to make you repeat yourself, not make you repeat yourself and that's what technology enables. He'll give you one example. In the example with the meal kit is if you come in and say “Hey, help my mind steak is spoiled. I'm really angry.” Well, first of all, you're probably pretty upset because your dinner just got ruined, that's not a good experience, you might stop using the brand. But if he immediately pop-up and say, “I'm sorry to hear you have a missing or spoiled ingredient, can you just give me the information, this and it pops up your meal and it says which of the ingredients is missing or spoil, tell me what's wrong with it.” And immediately, he'd say he could shoot a credit back to your account. And then you can still talk to the agent if you want and complain more. That's a really good experience.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feed you your meal that night, but it does make you feel like the brand is there for you and really cares about doing something right, they can make an offer and give you two free meals or whatever it might be. But again, even if he passed you to an agent in that case, the agent knows that you called because your steak was spoiled, the ice had melted, that you were expecting to get it with two side dishes and you only got one and they start the conversation with you knowing all this, they’re not asking you to repeat any of this. That's what they do.

Me: Brilliant. It's funny you mentioned the meal delivery service for home because I started using one recently and I find the young lady service to be so poor. When you call her she doesn't return your phone calls, when you send her a message on WhatsApp she takes forever to respond. She sends out her menus the week before like on a Friday and then you indicate to her how many days per week you wanted meals and which items you were interested in. And I think for last week I told her I was interested in the meal for Thursday. The meal wasn't delivered, I tried to call her on Thursday afternoon to ask her, “Weren't you supposed to deliver the meal today?” She hasn't responded to my WhatsApp. I called her twice, she hasn't responded to my call, frankly, I don't think I'm going to order from her again because either she's taken on more than she can chew or she's clearly not ready for this level of business because if you're dealing with people, and you're delivering meals to them and they've indicated to you what they want and when they want it, if you can’t manage the communication portion, then maybe you need to outsource that for the business.

Mahesh stated that he thinks that's a brilliant point. He thinks that oftentimes people take on more than they can handle but they lose sight of the customer. He thinks it goes back to the customer like how often does she talk to you and ascertain how well you like the service, did she check in with you? Does she have a survey?

Because if she loses you, the thing she probably doesn't grasp yet and he thinks some small business owners don't always grasp this is how expensive it is to acquire a customer, to get Yanique to try it for the first time is a really hard thing. And so losing you is much worse than acquiring two new people, because they already gone through the effort of convincing you and you've already done it.

So this does speak to something that he thinks a lot of entrepreneurs can do better, which is to survey and get feedback from customers, because you may well be sympathetic to her if she was talking to you. If she told you honestly, “Hey, look, I'm really struggling with this but I'm really trying to make it work. I'm an entrepreneur and I want to make this work. I'm so sorry about your meal. Let me see what I can do.” You were probably willing to give her the sun, the moon and the stars to get it right. But if you don't hear from her, you just assume that she doesn't care.

Me: I'm actually thinking of deleting her number out of my phone because I don't think I want to do business with her anymore. Her communication is extremely poor and her food, it's not amazing but it's good and it's healthy and it's a better choice than me having to go and have fast food for sure. But the challenge, as I said, is she needs to work out that aspect of it or she's going to lose more than one customer.

Mahesh agreed and stated that he thinks the other thing that he would say that technology allows us to do with a lot of the brands is to be predictive. So, if for example, Yanique is coming in frequently with questions about certain kinds of issue, they do something that they call category analytics for businesses, where they look at every single question that has ever been asked for that brand and they grouped them into big categories and so they can tell the brand, the food kit company that you're missing ingredient issues have spiked 23% in the last two weeks, something's up, they don't know what it is because they're not in their factory watching.

But they can drill in and they can tap into that, they can double click on it and they can see all the actual expressions by the user and they can do keyword searches, they can say show me everything with the word ice in it. So if the ice is melting, maybe they go back to the warehouse people and say, you need to package the ice better. So those are the kinds of insights that businesses often lack and it's very difficult to do because technology allows you to do it without having to have a human being looked at every single issue, it automatically categorizes all the questions.

Where Can We Find Mahesh Online

Website – www.solvvy.com

LinkedIn – Mahesh Ram

Twitter - @solvvyinc

Twitter - @rammahesh

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mahesh Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Mahesh shared that he actually has a bunch of them. But the one that recently came up as he was reading the book by the very, very famous Roman Emperor, Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, he had written a book 2000 years ago, so it's a long time. But everything in there so timeless because he's really does a lot of reflection on his life.

The quote that he said, which he thoughts was really great was, “Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.” And he thought that was just such a nice sort of simple way of saying, we're all given something and it's up to us to make the most of it, we keep looking around for something better, chances are you're never going to find it and the people too. So he thought that was a really nice quote.

Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners

Links

• The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon
• Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!