I was invited to the CCW annual convention held at the Mirage Resort in late June. The CCW, or Customer Contact Week, is a gathering of companies active in call center technology. A primary focus of the conference revolves around the cloud and the software that connects callers to the cloud. UJET is one of the companies that owned a booth at the conference.
UJET has cutting edge technology that allows the use of a smartphone app to make the interaction between the customer (caller) and the call center to be much more user friendly. Call center associates can have customer information at their fingertips with new technologies, allowing call times to be dedicated to customer service rather than to information gathering. The customer is interfacing with the call center through an app, preprogrammed to give the call center associate needed details regarding customer history. In many cases, the technology can save call centers money as per minute charges are not required with the new technology. I was able to interview Mr. Anand Janefalkar, founder and CEO:
Q&A with Anand Janefalkar, Founder & CEO, UJET
Q. How would you describe your business? What specifically do you do?
A. UJET is cloud-native support platform that makes customer support delightful. It involves taking data-driven insights and digital endpoints, infusing them with intelligent automation to deliver a holistic support experience where agents, supervisors, and executives have the tools they need to reduce costs, increase brand loyalty, and resolve their customers issues faster.
Q. What insights have you gained as you worked as a consultant that made you willing to take the risk of establishing your startup? What was the greatest need you saw that caused you to create UJET?
A. Having been on the cutting edge of technology, and specifically successfully shipping transformational products in mobile, cloud, and hardware has allowed me a unique perspective on how UX can be used to allow experience and scale to shine. Smartphones today are a supercomputer in your hand that is also a portal to the world of communications, media and services. Leveraging that tech to elevate a forgotten/afterthought sector like customer support was extremely enticing to try and disrupt the archaic industry.
Q. Who is your major competition? How do you work with the likes of Zendesk, Twilio, Salesforce, etc. Are you a complete platform for call center communication or do you team up with others?
A. Primarily the legacy providers. While Gartner data still shows over 13 million agents utilizing support platforms tied to an archaic on-premise solution, the movement to the cloud is well underway. We see companies such as Zendesk, Salesforce, and Twilio less as competitors, and more as partners. We integrate with existing CRM systems and partner with carriers and telephony services in order to deliver efficient real-time communications and data.
Q. What do you offer that puts you ahead of your competition? Is your encrypted photo communication your most important breakthrough? What type of companies would look for this capability? Legal call centers, insurance call centers, etc?
A. UJET is not only cloud-native but also smartphone centric meaning we are not a wrapper around a provider’s API stack or their on-premise architecture. Our system is designed from scratch, including one of, if not the only multimodal and fluid-omnichannel routing engine that allows for agent productivity configurations while moving between voice, chat, or SMS sessions.
Our SOC2 certified, HIPAA compliant visual (photo, video, screenshot) communication is one of our many key breakthroughs and showcases our commitment and the increasing demand for implementing smartphone capabilities into the support experience. On-demand services, fintech, and e-commerce are all types of organizations that are not only looking to implement our photo communication feature, but other capabilities including chat, SMS, video, and in-app communications.
Q. Are you able to beat your competition through price or better efficiency?
A. In many ways, both. Our focus is on truly delivering a robust experience without having a business model that is centered around marking up usage. Instead, we aim to make support an integral part of a product or service by valuing instant, first touch resolutions.
From an efficiency perspective, we believe that it should not take months for a full contact center deployment. We’ve been able to deploy hundreds of seats in under a week and integrate with company’s existing CRM’s, and mobile apps in just days.
Q. How many customers do you have? What is your growth rate? How many employees do you have, what is your revenue, and are you profitable?
A. We currently have several category leading customers like Instacart, Google Nest, Wag!, Fair, iZettle, and several others, with the list growing globally. We closed out last year with a more than 500% year-over-year growth in sales. Currently, we have just under 100 employees but are investing in talent in key areas such as GTM, product and engineering.
Q. How do you approach privacy policies both in the US and abroad? Specifically surrounding any sort of PII storage restrictions in Asia or EMEA?
A. We do not store any PII, not even recordings, which is unique and makes it a breeze for our customers’ information security teams. Also, having architected for security as a cornerstone of our technical stack, and understanding that data and security regulations intimately, we have one of the fastest times to compliance with GDPR, SOC2 Type II, HIPAA, and EU-US Privacy Shield certifications.
Q. What new products and/or business plans are in the works?
A. Our product roadmap is filled with exciting enhancements and integrations that make interacting with an agent effortless. It is a combination of infusing current and emerging technology into our own platform to create persona journeys, along with identifying other allied systems in their back office to provide a holistic experience view within one platform.
Q. Do you plan on acquiring other businesses or being acquired?
A. We recently celebrated our 4-year anniversary, and right now are focused on continuing the rapid growth of our business and delivering the features, functionality, and service that our customers need.
Q. Do you have an exit strategy such as a plan for an IPO?
A. Our focus at the moment is on growing our business through product innovation and integrations, new customer wins, and helping our current customers provide a unique and positive support experiences.
Q. How many apps does your app interface with? Is it important that you connect with a lot of information services?
A. Our mobile SDK allows us to interface with any app, allowing us to build support directly into any company’s mobile app, regardless of how many different apps they might have for different parts of their business.
Secondly, the ability to do live data dips and real time API integrations with custom databases or sources of truth really allows concise and actionable data to be delivered to an agent, supervisor, or executive to rapidly solve customers’ issues.
Q. Is there vulnerability in connecting worldwide or has technology advanced to the stage where this isn’t a concern?
A. A lot of that depends on the architecture. Allowing access from anywhere in the world can be seen as opening up vulnerabilities, but if security is a foundational piece of your technical stack, and you engineer for encryption, restricted secure key exchanges, and other best practices; and couple that with not storing sensitive data, allows for alleviating those concerns. Data minimization and metric maximization is a philosophy that we follow where we gather metrics and trends that do not have PII or even strings of data, but patterns, peak times, durations, repeat requests, and plug into a true neural network to allow ML/AI do its part without worrying about storing the actual data.
Conclusion
I came away from this interview with UJET with an understanding that these new tech companies, UJET being as advanced as any, had the luxury of not storing customer data, and therefore having advantages in security, even though the call center can be located anywhere in the world. It was a fascinating glimpse into a world of the dreary call center. The technology that is cloud based is really an exciting transformation of call center technology going forward.
I have no financial interest in UJET, nor was I compensated by them for this article. UJET does not have a private stock ticker symbol but according to management, is open to investment inquiries.
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