Today’s interview is with Vasili Triant, Chief Operating Officer of UJET, the world’s first and only cloud contact center platform for the smartphone era. Vasili joins me today to share his CCaaS Industry Hit List, what we should be thinking about when it comes to CX technology and what questions we should be asking.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Using customer experience as a tool to drive economic development – Interview with Mandisa Makubalo – and is number 424 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Vasili:

• When it comes to technology in the experience and service space, there’s all these things behind the scenes that no one wants to talk about, including the manufacturers, because frankly none of them have an advantage over each other.
• Over the last four months there have been so many outages and problems in this space.
• People talk about five nines (99.999%) up time but nobody is talking about reliability and the reporting of uptime statistics and what blocks of time are removed (maintenance, telco, infrastructure etc) from the up time statistics.
• Cloud providers like Amazon have been rock solid for a while but we are now seeing the vulnerability of them too. Amazon had two outages in the last five months.
• In the cloud space, the scale challenge happens a little bit smaller than in the on-premise space but it’s still there.
• 95% of the time people are attaching AI to their name but there is nothing different about their technology from the technology that they have been using and has existed for the last 5 to 8 years.
• The most important question: Did I enhance my customers experience?
• All these infrastructure providers have proprietary tool kits that you can leverage and build faster, build your software faster, get to market faster. But once you build to them, those tool kits aren’t available on the other infrastructure providers.
• The idea that you could pick up your software stack and move it to another cloud doesn’t exist. You literally would have to re factor your software to be independent of these services.
• Multi-cloud is becoming another buzzword and vendors are not multi-cloud in the true sense.
• What multi cloud really means is the ability to run your software stack across cloud providers and be independent. So, if there was an issue in one cloud provider or someone wanted to stop using it, your software stack should be able to keep on running.
• I think it’s our responsibility as manufacturers to build software that is agnostic.
• The only reason why cloud companies aren’t building software that’s agnostic is time to market.
• Key questions when it comes to software development: How often do you release software? Why do you have maintenance windows?
• Reality is people are still releasing and building software like they did in the on-prem days but instead of releasing in 18 month cycles, it is maybe 6-10 months now. It does not matter if you “containerize” or “use micro-services” if everything is dependent on one-another then it still is a single stack with not much agility.
• The future: The technology for sales and marketing will continue to transition over to customer experience to the point where we will know intent. Then, customer service professionals will proactively reach out to you.
• The real way to eliminate hold times is to figure out what the customers are doing beforehand and to reach out to them.
• If every company waited for someone to show up at their doorstep to buy something, they would never win.
• The people that are winning are the ones that are reaching out.
• We’ve got to take that same approach to customer experience because we will attach ourselves to those brands who treat us the best, not to those who made the best product, but those that give us the best overall experience.
• Vasili’s best advice: Remove any buzzwords you’ve gotten from people and forget all the vendors that are telling you all these technologies are going to change your experience or change your company. Put yourself in your customers shoes and say what is it that I would want and don’t put any barriers around it.
• Vasili’s Punk CX word: Us
• Vasili’s Punk XL brand(s): Zappos, MyTheresa
  

About Vasili

As Chief Operating Officer of UJET, Vasili Triant oversees all Go-to-Market activities including Sales, Channel, Alliances and Customer Success. He is passionate about empowering customers by providing innovative tools and technology that deliver one-of-a-kind customer experiences. Prior to UJET, Vasili held key roles at Cisco, ShoreTel, LiveOps, and Serenova where he served as CEO leading the company through significant growth and recognition.

Find out more about UJET here, say Hi to the folks at UJET and Vasili on Twitter at @ujetcx and @VasiliTriant respectively and feel free to connect with Vasili on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to Ramdlon on Pixabay for the image.