Today’s interview is with Gaurav Passi, Founder & CEO of Zingly. He joins me today to talk about some research that they have recently conducted about FORO (the Fear of Reaching Out), the Great CX Paradox, why Omnichannel was a myth and how ‘Rooms’ could be the answer.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why businesses need to invest in both brand and customer experience – Interview with Martin Gill of Forrester – and is number 540 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who 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 Gaurav:

• Our research shows that 71 % of consumers find customer service interactions as stressful or more stressful than their original problem.
• Companies are hiding behind AI and claiming innovation. And that is creating a great CX paradox, i.e., the more companies spend on their shiny new technology, particularly AI and its tools, the more they alienate their customers.
• Anytime a new innovation kicks in, it becomes a mad rush to get to it without really stepping back and understanding what it really needs to solve.
• Every brand should be thinking about what is the top experience I want to provide
• to a single consumer that I have. If I have 100 million consumers, what is it that I want to do best for one of them?
• The tools, like AI, are in my mind about scale.
• The whole service and experience space is creating a Franken-Stack. Everybody’s trying to build all these different things, and they don’t talk to each other.
• The CRM space and the call center technology space has been totally separated for decades.
• The CRM is basically historical data of a customer and the historical data is stored in the shape of a case, an opportunity, or a lead, but it’s historical information. Meanwhile, call center technologies are systems of engagement, which is a real time conversation going on with the customer whether on the phone or in any other channel. But, in any contact center you will see agents speaking to customers and when they are finished they will end up typing up their notes into the CRM. See the separation?
• Omnichannel was a myth. It was just a marketing term that vendors used and the reason it was a myth is because the context did not stay in one single place. If your customer chose to go from voice call to video to chat to a digital platform, the context just evaporated.
• We felt like the best way to serve a consumer is if somehow we can bring the data, the generative AI, and humans all together in a single place. That single place has to be the easiest, simplest way for a customer to engage with you on their own terms whenever they want.
• And that’s what Zingly rooms are all about. It combines the data, the GenAI, and the humans all together. It’s a collaborative centralized hub. They can come in the middle of the night. They can come in the morning. They can put media files in the room, make payments in it, they can do docusigns in it. They can do whatever they want in it. But it exists in perpetuity. It never disappears.
• It’s essentially a single channel, a pipe between the customer and the brand they’re dealing with. And that exists in perpetuity. It’s like all channels, but in one channel.
• Our machine has something called a relationship AI, which I think is the most stunning part of a technology, which really constantly understands when to bring a human in the loop and if to bring a human in the loop.
• A large financial institution leverages our technology for deposits with their clients. Before Zingly, they had no after-hours service. With Zingly, after-hours service completely changed. Today, 35% of their new deposits or new opportunities are coming through Zingly rooms. They added a quarter of a billion dollars last year on our platform. Before Zingly, they were spending on average $10 per voice call coming to the contact center, with the highest percentage of that being labour costs. Now, each customer contact is costing them 50 cents.
• Zingly is like an orchestration front-end piece, which can operate in both synchronous and asynchronous manners, but it also captures a record of all conversations, which can be revisited in perpetuity.
• Gaurav’s best advice: Think about the end customer. That’s the only way you can change the experience. Consider the most fascinating experience you can provide for each consumer and build from there. Then figure out how to scale it to everyone.
• Gaurav’s Punk CX brand: All of the independent coffee shops out there that have figured out the art of how to make their consumers happy. One consumer at a time.

About Gaurav

Gaurav believes every customer relationship should be as easy as chatting with a friend – simple, trustful, and delightful. He recognizes that the key to achieving this mission at scale lies in the right combination of GenAI, human expertise, and data, enabling enterprises to provide hyper-personalization to their customers on an infinite scale.

His vision for Zingly, shared with his cofounders, started with a single mission: to empower companies to build relationships with their customers bigger than business.

Gaurav is a dynamic leader with over 25 years of end-to-end experience in the CX industry, spanning CRM, Cloud Contact Centers, and Unified Communications. He has helped top enterprises modernize their customer experience with many award-winning products. Before founding Zingly, Gaurav was President of Cloud Business at Avaya Inc., where he led global initiatives to reimagine operations, drive reinvestments in cloud, and integrate emerging technologies like AI and mobile.

Notably, Gaurav was also CPO/EVP of Products, Technology, and Marketing at Five9, where he helped transform the company into an industry-leading Cloud Contact Center provider. Prior to Five9, he was Head of Products at Deutsche Telekom HBS (T-Mobile brand), launching a cloud unified communications offering. He also spent over a decade at Amdocs, most recently as Vice President of Products for the Customer Experience business unit, where he built next-generation customer experience and CRM platforms.

Gaurav thrives on challenges, finding his creativity and drive peak when all roads seem lost, and he brings out the best in those around him. He loves golfing (though his daughters often beat him!) and cooking for friends and family at home.

Check out the research mentioned in our chat, Zingly’s website and do feel free to connect with Gaurav on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by maks_d on Unsplash