 Hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation. Today we're going to talk about a really interesting topic, at least it's interesting to me, and that is if we go back and the old adage that when you automate bad process or bad business, you just get more bad business at scale. And when we think about customer service over the last number of years or customer engagement over the last number of years, in many respects we've done a great job of automating really bad practices. And all that has led to is an increased frustration amongst consumers who are trying to utilize an engagement form that they want, more digital engagement, but end up being even more frustrated because it still takes the same amount of time and it still has the same failure rates. And to discuss that today we've got Mahesh Ram who's a founding partner of Solvi to talk a little bit about some of these transformations that are taking place in terms of how digital engagement's going to change the way that businesses interact with consumers. Mahesh, welcome to the Cube. Oh, it's great to be here. I'm a fan of the Cube and honored to be here. So Mahesh, let's start. Who, tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us a little bit about Solvi. Sure, my background is in technology and I've built two successful startups in the past. The last one was a company that was acquired by Pearson in 2012 focused on automation for non-native English speakers. But my entire career has been spent really thinking about ways in which we can use technology to make people's lives better and improve existing workflows and processes. And so it's why Solvi attracted me, why it's so exciting and I think this is the most interesting thing I've ever done in my career, so I'm excited about that. Now Solvi has a pretty decent reputation as being a thought leader in this domain of not just cutting the cost of engagement but actually improving the quality of engagement. How does it do that? So I think it's a great question. So it starts with a mission to the company. I think that's the easiest way to say it. You know, our mission is to enable every interaction between consumers and business to be effortless, anywhere, anytime on any channel. So if you start with that mission, you really start to focus in on what's most important. What's most important is to deliver that amazing experience for that end user or that consumer and at the same time drive down the operational cost for the business, i.e. improve their efficiency. And so our vision for the company is to take our intelligent AI and machine learning automation technology which is world-class and is better than anything else in the market and to apply it to deliver on a vision which is we want these interactions between the consumer and the business to be successfully completed in five minutes or less. Five minutes. Yes, and today it's measured in hours, eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. That's the vision and we're well on the way to accomplishing that. All right, so as a thought leader, give us an example of how a business is doing that and then we'll get into some of the technology questions but how are, first off, what is the competitive advantage of being able to complete a client engagement under five minutes versus eight hours? Well, first of all, I think, again, if we put the end user or the consumer at the focal point, we're talking about a fundamental change in what they expect from businesses. They expect immediacy, they expect accuracy, they want you to respect their time. In fact, I think the latest, some of the latest analysts report says that valuing consumers time is the single biggest driver to brand loyalty. So if you've got that situation, you've got an obligation to the consumer to deliver what they want. Well, now put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, which we all are. I'm a consumer, I come to a business, I'm asking you a question about a product, a service, a defect, anything, an order that's missing. I expect to get an answer very quickly because I have my time is precious and I know that someone like me has asked that question in the past. Why has it not been possible in the past for me as a consumer to get that answer right away, leveraging the expertise that has already happened in the enterprise and when I do that, when Solvi is able to enable that for the business, there's multiple benefits. The consumer is happier, their CSAT goes up, their customer satisfaction goes way up. Their time is respected, they get their answer in a minute or less as opposed to hours. The business is happy because there's no ticket created, there's no need for a human agent to go back and forth with you, ask you a bunch of things and maybe come back to you six hours later and now you're upset. Maybe you've got switched brands in the meanwhile because you're so angry at having to wait. So the benefit is I sometimes say to our customers, it's a magic X, the CSAT goes up and the cost goes down and that's never been possible before Solvi. All right, so how does it work? Okay, so how it works is very simple. So the first thing we do is we engage with the business. So the business is our customer, right? They buy the product or they buy our SaaS platform. It's a SaaS platform built on AI and machine learning technology that was developed by my two co-founders during their PhD work at Carnegie Mellon. So at its core is the ability to understand natural language expressions of issues by the end user, by the consumer. So typically people give us their life story but they're asking for a refund, the ability to parse that conversation and say I think you want a refund, let me help you get that, is a very powerful piece of IP. So we go to companies and we say, just tell us where all of your knowledge assets are. You don't have to touch it, don't create anything new, don't build a new silo because they already have the silo and we simply go out and index it all, learn from it and start building a knowledge graph for that business. It's specific to how that business handles resolutions but it also learns how customers have asked questions in the past and how agents have answered it. So again, your best expertise is captured and used in that knowledge graph. We then say, here's a single, in less than an hour, one line of JavaScript, here's a modal you can put in front of your consumer. You can put it anywhere you want and it says when you need help, click on it, pops up, mobile, you can speak the question and tell the consumer, just tell me what your issue is. It understands the intention of that question or the issue and then goes in the knowledge graph and says, can I find an answer in this knowledge graph that can help you help yourself? And if so, it matches it and it's actually getting you a specific resolution. So it's not making you wade through pages of material. It's saying, here are the three steps you need to do to reset your account. Now that is instant and immediate for the consumer. They don't have to hunt, they don't have to search. And it says, have I helped you? And we're putting the power in the hands of the consumer. We're saying we don't want it to be false friction. We're saying you the consumer can say, nope, this didn't help me. And now the company can then guide you to the right flow. They can do it with a chat. If you're a VIP user, maybe they get you on a phone call, whatever it might be. But by putting the consumer at the center, by delivering real value to them, we've accomplished both sides, right? The CESA attire, the cost goes down because we are actually self-serving anywhere from 15 to 40% of the tickets or issues that used to cost the business money are being self-served now. And so that's a pretty miraculous transformation for the business and for the consumer. Well, in today's world of attention is everything. Every, as you said, every experience, every engagement has to be a source of value to the customer. And so not only do you get a better customer, but you presumably also get a richer set of interactions because the customer now believes that the system actually is helpful, is useful. Does that data then go back into the system so that it becomes even more knowledgeable about the nature of the problems, the nature of the resolutions, and anticipatory about how to improve things and maybe product people can get visibility and stuff? Is that kind of where all this goes? It's a very organic system and it learns constantly. I think that's the really powerful thing about it. So it learns many things. So it learns when I show you, when you ask me questions, it learns if I have not given you a good answer, it actually learns from the negative. I still pass you to the agent because then it follows it all the way through and says, how did the agent answer it? And it learns from that interaction. And so because we know we can't self-serve every question that a consumer has, but we're getting better and better and better. In fact, our self-service rates have doubled just in the last 12 months because of the machine learning and the ability to learn. And we actually learn across all the businesses we do business with. We learn things, for example, that consumers, if you show a consumer more than a paragraph of text, they don't engage in self-service. If you show them bullets, they are much more likely to interact. Those are implicit learnings that the system uses to more accurately give you a responsive. But there's another flip side to this, which is when we see 100% of the conversations between the consumer and your business, we're now able to go to business and give them categorical views of what's actually going on once their product or service has shipped to the consumer, which they've never had before. We're now able to say to them, we think that payment page that people are using to renew might be broken because there seems to be a lot more issues associated with that. Now, that's something that the engineer who built that page may actually not know or if the person said, that's broken, they'd say, how do you know? Show me the data. And now you can actually go with a data-driven model and say, we can tell you, this is 14% of the issues this week and the two weeks ago it was 2%. Can you tell me what's changed? Or you can put a dollar value on it. This product seems to be defective and it's costing us money because we have to keep having to do returns. Here's the actual number of situations where that's happened in the last week. It's costing us $2 million a year. Fix it. You know, that's the kind of insight that the VPs of customer experience or customer support have had to spend hundreds of hours to try to massage and get and it doesn't give them a seat at the table with the strategy with product and market. But every company has been talking about the need to build their community where basically a community is defined by folks who have something in common on our taking common actions. But one of the challenges has been is how do I provide value so that I get that type of interaction? Let me ask you a question. Are we ultimately suggesting, we're often getting to a point where the quality of engagement is such, and while it keeps costs low, that it might actually catalyze even greater engagement with a customer base so that you learn not just initially, you not only learn something about a product, but for example you might actually learn things about how to facilitate adoption because customers are willing to engage more often and more deeply as a consequence of a good experience in this using solving related types of technologies. It is the opportunity to use that customer engagement when they're contacting your business about an issue or a problem. The opportunity is first, I have to take care of your issue. You won't listen to me if I don't take care of your issue well. But if I do that, I have an enormous opportunity to educate you. How can you do better with the product or service I sold you? Perhaps you need something that's on top of that. Maybe you're a free user and by subscribing to the premium product, you'd get all the benefits that you're frustrated about and maybe that's a time to give you an offer. So I think that notion of personalized recommendation is something that has actually never been possible before with the old systems when someone, the idea was that support was kind of a backwater in many ways, which it actually should never have been. And in fact, the leading brands like Zappos realized quickly that by winning on that basis, you could actually dominate the market. But it was often the case that the people in support felt like goalkeepers. Just keep the issues away. But in fact, there's a, now in an integrated world, it's very difficult with subscription-based businesses, for example, to know when you're buying and when you're being asking for support. It's a subscription service. I could cancel at any time. So now I'm engaging with your brand, I'm asking a question, hey, how do I get more of XYZ shipped to my house? It is an enormous opportunity to not only answer my question, but then suggest things, recommend things, playbooks. So if you think about that experience, how would I enhance the consumer experience? That interactive conversational flow is the perfect place to do it. I would think it also would allow you to envision other types of engagement. Because as long as a consumer finds it valuable to have that conversation, then they'll be willing to enter into that conversation. And it's solidly, well, so let me step back. Where does this all go? Because we've been talking about being able to do this for a number of years. And as I said, in the preamble, in many respects, all we did was digitize bad process. But now we're talking about bringing technology to bear and dramatically improving the process. Five minute resolution, pretty good. I mean, as a consumer, I'd like that. So where does this go? Where does the limit of utilizing these technologies to incorporate or enhance engagement? So illustrating, let me illustrate with an example that I think is very compelling and shows the power of how this is going to change our world. So one of our customers is Eero, the smart Wi-Fi system. You're probably familiar with it. One of the most innovative products on the planet. Now, we had, we've been working with Eero for a number of years and we are for actually well over a year and they just published a case study about what we've accomplished with them. So we have self-serve 45% of the issues that would have come in to them that have, you know, conversations that have come into them regarding issues. And that's a fantastic number. They had never seen anything close to it. And that's a great outcome for the business and for the consumer. Under one minute is the average time for resolution for those 45%. Imagine again, how much time I've saved you and me or all of us as consumers of Eero. But the better story that I liked is last couple of weeks ago, we got a call from the CEO of one of the leading Midwestern electronics distributors in the world. And he said, I'm going to have my support team or customer experience team contact you guys because I was at home, I bought an Eero Wi-Fi smart Wi-Fi system. I went home and tried to install it and I had trouble and I went on and I saw he gave me the exact steps that took to solve the issue and I never had to contact them and I was able to get the Wi-Fi up and running in minutes and I was on my way and I'm delighted with my Eero system and it was because of this interface. And he said, I think my company should be using it too. And that was a cat, you know, one of many, many catalytic events for us that realized, wow, we're touching, you know, over 200 million consumers with our service. We're reaching all the way out. We're extending these brands promise into the consumers homes, into their devices. We had a employee of ours. Oh, sorry. 200 million? 200 million. So that's literally 10% of the population's online. That's, well, it's, if you're talking about the world's leading brand. So we're working with the leading brands that are reaching these people. So by extension, Salvi is a, and so you're talking about companies for, you know, leading gaming companies, on-demand companies, consumer electronics, you know, these are all companies that self-service and automation, yeah, and it's intelligent automation, right? It doesn't require a lot of work from the business. As I said, we implemented in less than an hour with one line of JavaScript. We've developed very powerful, unsupervised machine learning models that can just take all that transcript data from all the past conversations that consumers have had with your business and automatically learn the best stuff from it and then be able to show that users are right issues. So the customer journey is just, is where we're so focused, right? Because the customer journey is the opportunity for the brand to really create a market-leading position. And we're enhancing that conversation. Fantastic. Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Salvi. Salvi. Salvi, yes. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a great conversation about the evolution of customer service and where it goes. It's my pleasure. Honored to be on theCUBE. So once again, this is Peter Burris. This has been theCUBE Conversation. Until next time.