Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What exactly was the form that you were offering and was going to take to address all the issues and pain points that you just talked about?

Anand Janefalkar: It was to completely redesign the architecture. After talking to industry experts and to people that have sold to a lot of contact centers, I found that the architecture of contact software, in 2015 and even today, are really based on the origins of the on-premise hardware architecture. They were designed for physical devices whether they’re servers or MPLS lines that are connected to PBX’s. All of those were very archaic. Those were based on the times before the smartphone or the cloud era.

It’s no surprise that even today, there’re lots and lots of on-premise that they’re still having issues with. It’s just bad architecture. I decided to completely re-architect. I think it benefited me that I had never set foot in a contact center before. I didn’t have any kind of baggage or technical debt from this industry. I was bringing a perspective of a really high skill cellular industry and really high uptime wireless infrastructure and high grade UX. I wanted to bring all that together and just amalgamate that into an excellent product and service, which would totally transform the sector. That’s what I did.

Today, you can log into a banking app with your fingerprint, touch ID, face ID, or pattern on Android. You can take a photo of a check and send it to a mobile check deposit. But if you go to the support tab, you see that there’s a number of phone numbers there. If you click on something, it’s through the outside of the app and into a dialer, which is a very disconnected experience. They end up asking who you are, why you are calling, and all of that. I think that’s completely broken.

If I can move or make payments of $5,000, or get an ATM code, or be able to move money from different accounts just by using my fingerprint or pattern, then it seems completely broken that when I’m starting a conversation in the same app, they’re asking me who I am and why I am calling. They could use the same method that their infosec team has already approved for all of these functions where identification and verification can’t be reused. So that’s where it started.

Today, we have patented SmartActions where agents, with a click of a button, can request verification through any of these methods – touch ID, face ID, and pattern on Android without registration. This is just reusing the same rules that are based and approved for the app that they’re originating the call or chat from. I think that was the foundation of it. What I found was we wanted to be a platform and not just an add-on product. I wanted to put together a service which completely abstracts the underlying transport layer and takes care of the uptime. We take care of the user experience and all that good stuff.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar
1 2 3 4 5 6 7