Transforming Customer Service with ASAPP’s Priya Vijayarajendran

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. My next guest, this is a name I'm I Practice.

I think I'm gonna do it. Her, her first name's Easy. It's Priya.

So let me introduce you to Priya Vi Viraj and John Viraj. And John, am I close? Priya, Alan, that's very nice to be here.

That's impressive. Viraj and John. That's right.

Okay. If I said it more, maybe it would roll off my tongue easier, but you know, like you taught me, I did it in syllables anyway, Priya is the CEO of a company called asap. That's with two Ps A-S-A-P-P.

And I want, we're going to hear all about it, but before we hear all about asap, let's find out more about Priya. Real welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great to have you on share with our audience a little bit about your journey to becoming CEO here at asap.

A First of all, thank you for having me today. Pleasure. Well, you already introduced me with my name, Priya Rajen, by the name.

I come from southern part of India, um, as most of my peers, um, studied computer science, strong engineering background. My fascination was solving harder engineering problems. That's kind of how I grew in the computer science career.

I started with the best enterprise software companies, like SAP in Europe. Uh, been there for almost 19 years and then, uh, pushed myself, uh, building products with AI at IBM for about three, four years here in United States. Moved from Europe to here and then, uh, worked at Microsoft, leading the data and AI portfolio for about three years.

So my journey was more towards how can I find harder problems? There was a point in time where, uh, the solutions, um, what technology to apply and what business impact that we are we solving became my inspiration. So it brought, that's how it brought me to asap.

Excellent. Excellent. Um, well, you opened that door.

Let's walk through. Tell us about asap. Yeah.

Uh, coming from me, I joined ASAP as a CTO of the company because, like I said, ASAP has been on a journey to solve one of the hardest problems in contact center. You and I talk to our favorite brands every day by picking up the phone. Of course, you're not connected right away.

You're waiting for 30 minutes right in the phone call, uh, trying to be connected or you're trying to have a chat conversation. This problem is a prime AI native problem, millions of customers, billions of interaction generated. And how do you best solve it?

How do you give that personalized, um, uh, Asian tech experience to these cus consumers who are calling for something to be solved? Either you could be a someone who's stuck at an airport trying to rebook your flight, or you are a customer who's trying to understand why your bill is so different this month compared to the last two months. Or you are somebody who's waiting for your e-commerce order, wanting to track an order.

The problem could have different degrees of complexity. With deep integration into this as a technologist, I, this problem was too addictive not to solve. So that's how I joined asap.

And over a period of time, I grew within the company. And, uh, this is an industry for the last 60 years wanting to be disrupted, not just me as a company. We're very passionate about solving the problem, going to the root cause of how do you completely redefine futuristic contact centers, putting the experience of the customer together with humans in the middle of it.

That's what ASAP is solving and with the team of asap. I love it. I love it.

So, you know, I, we always prepare notes for these, uh, interviews. And so the headline on our note for this one was the AI company that said no to chatbots and what, right. And that, let's tell us a little bit about that story, if you don't mind.

Yeah. Uh, you know, um, it's been 28 years I've been building enterprise software for large enterprises. I've gone through the curve of technology shifts, you know, from three tier architecture to cloud and others.

So when, and I've built chatbots even in my career. So, um, a lot of us, when we said AI is commoditized, it's happening for everybody. And rightfully so, contact centers, were not getting any outcome out of it because they're spending a lot of money on maintaining their infrastructure.

They are hiring more and more agents, but agents are quitting also because it's not an easy job for agents, but your CSAT score, your customers are very unhappy. Like it's a, it's a cycle of its own. Um, and out of desperation, many folks are looking for any incremental innovation, we can call it as augmentation.

Hey, can I do anything to my agent who can service this pair? And those are abilities to deflect. You could have chat bots or you take an entire flow like Alan is calling your favorite bank to say that, Hey, I have an overdraft situation.

So it's a very determined flow where you are automating some parts of it. So it's, it's a very chosen some aspects of workflow automation. This is just, just having like a pill which eases your symptoms.

It's not really solving it, it's only a bandaid to the entire problem. It's incremental in nature. And that is why ASAP did not chose that route.

It fundamentally goes into how do we scale automation? How do you really solve the problem? And which means you need to transform the workforce.

You need to transform the entire experience by having an autonomous agent in contact center, which understands the nuance of how a banking customer would call and how do you respond to them without having to work through a data mine workflow. That's the power of this technology, Alan. So think of like, you are hiring your best agent who is gonna be 24 7 across the channel.

Voice chat, SMS, any medium always available for Alan whenever you're calling. That's the pro promise That's valuable. That's valuable.

You know, you, you're right, people tend to think that chat botts are invented with ai. No, they weren't invented with ai. Chatbots have been around for a long time and, and I think unfortunately for many of us, including myself, a lot of the chat bots, uh, experience was less than desirable, let's say.

Right? How many of us, even, it's not a chat bot per se, but it's an audio chat bot on the phone and we start screaming representative, representative, representative, right, because you just wanna get through the chat bot and get a live person that I could talk to. Yeah.

I think it, another important thing is people tend to think of how, how can we use AI to replace the human, not, not make the human better, not supplement the human right. And I, and I think this goes beyond chatbots, frankly. It goes to the whole core of the AI thing.

Yes, there'll be some jobs that the AI does instead of a person, but for the most part, at, at least now, especially the AI is a co-pilot, not a pilot, right? The AI is a force multiplier, but not the force, Right? And, and I think we, we need to remember that, right?

And, and those workers who embrace AI as some, as a help, not as a threat, I think are the ones who are gonna do well in today's economy. And world companies like ASAP that recognize that will do well versus the ones who say, okay, we're here to, you know, make you into a horseless carriage and we're, you're a horse that we're putting out to pasture. Exactly.

It, it's not about bringing an extinction extinction to a certain workforce. That's never going to be possible, especially in an experience industry. So ASAP has a very, very strong point of view.

Companies who are trying to solve this harder problem should not choose efficiency over empathy. That's a not a good place to be in. So aaps point of view is this landscape and the way in which we give the experience will change for sure.

To your point, there are productivity capabilities supplementing, augmenting or actually leading so that the existing human agents can go and solve some harder problems. They can actually have an oversight. They're also feeling good about what they are.

It raises the bar to everybody. Everybody needs help. The agent who's serving it needs help because he's looking at 10 screens trying to get on top of the policy and compliance.

And of course it's error prone trying to serve this. Imagine this person is watching an AI answer all of this because it's digitally integrated. The person is approving or acknowledging yes, it's the right decision to do it.

The job changes in terms of what the human agents gets to do it. And so that's why the point of view of about, um, it is a contact center with AI leading where humans are providing the right oversight, the coaching and uh, monitoring abilities. So in fact, we launched some of our very powerful capabilities, um, by working hand in hand with some of the most complex and scaled enterprises in the world like airlines and telco industries and most iconic brands that we can imagine, Alan, they appreciate the fact that human agents are available in the loop as an approver of some of the decisions AI is making because trust and explainability of AI is very, very important in contact centers.

The fact that anybody, any supervisor can monitor the conversation. So your a agent is treated like a human agent on how are you conversing? Is it the right tone, is it the right recommendation?

The monitoring? And lastly, which is the real USP operator, is how do you put such a probabilistic system in front of your consumer? The fact that you can test it, you're not gonna wait for 1 million conversation and then realize, oops, that didn't go very well.

The fact that you can simulate and fine tune it light, it's almost like a living thing which learns based on the conversation. So these capabilities make it really possible, and it's not just a vision, it's really happening. More customers are live with it.

So the, we just launched recently and yesterday we made it as a general availability announcement as well. You heard it here. Thanks for sharing.

We always like to get a scoop out there, Priya, so we appreciate that. Um, hey, you know what we did, we didn't even mention the website once. What's the URL?

com. com. Dot com.

That's right. Is there a story why there's two P's on as SAPP? There is no story.

com, uh, there's no, uh, story behind the alphabets. But, uh, any of the listeners, both the technologist and the business stakeholders, I want them to know that ASAP is fundamentally rethinking customer service like an agent. Um, we are tired of waiting for an agent.

We are tired for somebody not remembering why you called. Enterprises are tired of spending a lot of dollars. Do you know an average customer service call?

If you had called any brand to the, this week, it cost about $7, Alan. That's how much really companies spend on answering per, and, and sometimes the call goes to 30 minutes to 40 minutes, not just the agent time, the transcription, the recording, the analysis lot goes behind the scenes. So if we can go and scale that industry to be like, what if we are able to serve this bringing 50% more containment?

Containment is you are able to solve the problem for the customer. That's what that containment metric means. You're able to double your containment with half the labor and four times more efficient and 25% less enough, um, uh, mistakes that it's no could be made by a human agent.

That's the promise that ex excites both technologies. So when you are building on top of the unprecedented pace of innovation, which is happening in generative ai, with all the right things about foundationally building on top of lums, having our own architecture with multi-agent orchestration, our time is well spent in disrupting this industry. Yeah, Absolutely.

Bria, thank you for coming on here and telling us a, I know short period of time, you gave us a whole bunch of information, and I appreciate that. Uh, you know, I, this, this whole help desk call center, you know, support the area is one, like $7 a call. I think that's eye-opening to people out here.

It's one that, it's a huge, a huge need, and it sounds like you guys have built a, a better, a better solution. So keep doing what you're doing. Keep us posted.

We'd love to have you come back on soon. Um, until then, thanks for coming on Textron tv. Absolutely.

Thank you, Alan. Next time you are flying in airlines or calling at Telco, you know, you might need to, I'm gonna remember, I'm gonna say to myself, that was $7, or you're talking to an ASAP agent, so thanks. Or it's an ASAP agent.

Even better. All right, we're gonna take a break on text on tv. We're here.

We'll be right back.