Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To do this, how much integration do you need with the system that you are working with?

Vasco Pedro: We have built native integration with different CRMs. If you go to the Zendesk marketplace, you will find the Unbabel app there. The integration is done with the CRM itself, so if you download and install our app, that’s it. What you need to do is create an account, get a subscription, and then we create an account for you.

We do the onboarding process. There is the onboarding process internally in terms of setting up the AI components and making sure that everything is working properly. In terms of the integration work itself with the CRM, it’s very straightforward.

Sramana Mitra: From a usage model point of view, how does it work? Do the websites of the customers who are implementing your solution provide an opportunity for customer service for Portuguese or French, for example, from their website? Do they offer a different language for customer service and that’s where they bring you in?

Vasco Pedro: Yes. For example, during COVID, Logitech ended up having a huge increase in the number of tickets. Everyone was buying cameras and other devices. They saw a 300% surge in customer support tickets. They wanted to continue to offer customer support in all the languages.

They took a bunch of English technologies and added a double on top and because of that, they reduced the ticker time from 15 days to 48 hours. They also reduced the cost. Typically, a company doesn’t offer language support in a certain language. Now they can do it easily without having to hire people.

It could also be about availability and saying, “Look, I already offer support in Portuguese, but I can’t do it 24/7. It’s expensive and it’s hard to scale.” As a response, they shift to a language-agnostic model using Unbabel. They might announce that on their website.

In terms of pricing, we have two pricing schemes right now. One is the most typical which is the subscription where it’s based on the volume of customer interactions. The other is an FTE model where you pay a certain amount per agent and it’s unlimited for that agent. You are paying a fee for that agent to be able to communicate in any language.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about customer penetration. Specifically, let’s take the example of what you walked me through earlier about being in the Zendesk marketplace and having native integration with them. What percentage of Zendesk customers are using Unbabel?

Vasco Pedro: The percentage is still fairly small. We focus on large enterprises. We have a lot of well-known brands like Microsoft or Logitech. There are several others that I can’t specifically mention. In terms of the overall number of Zendesk customers given that our target is enterprise customers, it’s still a very small percentage of the overall footprint.

We don’t just focus on Zendesk as well. We have integration with all the major CRMs. We are still in the sub 500 range of customers but all within the large enterprise and well-known brands.

Sramana Mitra: You would summarize the answer by saying that you are in about 500 out of the Global 2000.

Vasco Pedro: Sub-500, so less than that.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Vasco Pedro: Around 200.

Sramana Mitra: So 10% of the global 2000 are already in this mode?

Vasco Pedro: Our goal within the next year is to have 500 of the world’s top companies running through the customer service language operations on Unbabel.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro
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