Thought Leaders in Big Data: SupportLogic CEO Krishna Raj Raja (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is your primary customer base in the tech sector?

Krishna Raj Raja: Right now, we are focused on the tech sector. This is intentional. We have closed a lot of technology companies. Salesforce is one of them. Others are Databricks, Snowflake, 8×8. The who’s who of Silicon Valley are using us. The reason why we chose to focus on them is that technology companies have highly complex support.

When you have highly complex support, there’s a lot of back and forth. These are B2B where customer relationships matter a lot. Also, they charge for support significantly. If you’re a Logitech customer, the mouse is going to cost you $50. The moment you call support, the company lost the $50. There is no incentive for them to deliver great support experience; their focus is case deflection. In B2B, the experience matters a lot. Now we are expanding into other verticals.

Sramana Mitra: What other verticals have applicability for your product?

Krishna Raj Raja: I would say anybody who needs customer support.

Sramana Mitra: The answer I’m looking for is, what verticals have good complex technology support, or primarily B2B customer base? Are we talking medical devices?

Krishna Raj Raja: We have sold to a few healthcare companies. We have sold to backend processing support. We’re in early stage discussions with B2C’s as well. We went to market for B2B but the technology works for any sector. Now we’re expanding the beachhead. We are in conversations with streaming media companies and ridesharing companies.

Sramana Mitra: You said you also facilitate support quality improvement in BPOs. What is the workflow of that?

Krishna Raj Raja: Let’s say you’re outsourcing support. The biggest thing is what is going to be the quality of my support. It’s going to be cheaper, but my brand experience is going to be impacted. The fact that we can monitor those interactions, identify soft skills gaps, and route the case to the right person is very crucial. It’s crucial because there is an interesting relationship between attrition and case routing.

Attrition is high in BPOs. Training new personnel and onboarding them is challenging. You have to know who has the skills to route the case to. Skill-based routing is very crucial for BPOs. A lot of BPOs are recognizing the value that we deliver. TechMahindra is a partner and they are thinking of bundling our product.

Sramana Mitra: You said that unstructured data handling technology didn’t exist before now. People have been trying to do unstructured data modeling, and support has been one of the biggest use cases since the mid 90s. There were many companies from that era. What do you think has changed? Where has significant progress happened to make this possible at scale?

Krishna Raj Raja: AI technology has been there for 50 years. One of our angel investors has been in the industry for some time. His PhD thesis was on NLP 30 years ago. We didn’t even have good computers back then for the NLP compute requirements.

The big shift is, there is a natural evolution. Big data happened. Access to a lot of data is very important. Access to high amounts of compute power is there. GPU computing plays a significant role in deep neural networks. It’s a culmination of many things. The algorithms existed, but the infrastructure is not there.

Sramana Mitra: It’s the data and compute power where you attribute the readiness of the market.

Krishna Raj Raja: The foundational one is cloud. There’s one central warehouse. The second thing is the compute power like GPU computing. That’s one aspect. The third thing is, a lot of ML is about data cleansing. It’s not the fancy models; it’s data laundry. You have to have more efficient tools to process data laundry systems. These are all infrastructure elements. Technologies like Snowflake or Google’s BigQuery. A lot of big data technologies have evolved and made a huge difference.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: SupportLogic CEO Krishna Raj Raja
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