Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of positioning, there are obviously a lot of enterprise contact software players and there are some leaders. Right now, Suite within Oracle is a major player and has been around with deep integrations and a deep presence in the industry. Once you sorted out your positioning, whom do you consider as potential partners? Whom do you consider as direct competitors? What did the positioning shake out to be?

Anand Janefalkar: We figured out that we wanted to focus on real-time customer support. We didn’t try to do everything. We didn’t want to be a ticketing system as well as an FAQ system as well as real-time. We thought that the real-time aspect is where it’s broken. That’s the part where if there’s a bad customer experience, customers leave and that causes churn.

So we decided, from very early on, that we wanted to be CRM-agnostic. Slightly competing products might have their own chat or voice products. They weren’t really the main focus of these companies. Majority of their revenues came from ticketing, case creation, conversation logging, and the FAQ’s hosting in the help desk. We didn’t enter that market at all.

In fact, we ran on top of CRM’s. A lot of our customers, Google’s Nest, for example, uses us on top of Salesforce. Instacart and Postmates are other companies that our customers use on top of Zendesk. We decided that CRM’s aren’t something that we’re going to compete against. But like you’re saying, there’re many companies out here that are leaders. We really don’t discriminate. We’re competing against all of them. We frequently run into companies that are publicly traded. These sectors have tons of licenses that they’ve had for the last 10 to 15 years.

Sramana Mitra: You said you did your series B. By this time you’re getting good customer traction. You’re working on top of players like Salesforce and Zendesk and you integrate with them. What happens next? What is the 2018 journey?

Anand Janefalkar: Actually, the series A was in April 2017. The launch was in May 2017. The series B was in January 2018. That was led by Karim Faris from Google Ventures. City Ventures also participated in that round.

Sramana Mitra: So what is the 2018 journey?

Anand Janefalkar: The 2018 journey was basically taking everything that we had built – taking security certifications that we had put together at the end of 2017 and truly starting to build a good market team. Before November 2017, I didn’t really have a sales team or marketing team. So I started building that. I started going to market.

It’s creating an outbound sales machine. It was really difficult to have customers reach out to you, especially when you’re such a small company in this massive sector that’s dominated by publicly-traded companies. It’s almost expecting too much to have an inbound model. So we created a terrific outbound model and that’s how we landed all of our customers.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have now?

Anand Janefalkar: I think we’re around 40.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar
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