Elevating Customer Service: Gaurav Passi on Zingly AI and the Future of Engagement [SPOTCAST]

In this episode we speak with Gaurav Passi, CEO of ZinglyAI about his WHY, WHAT and HOW when it comes to customer service and the fear of reaching out.

Gaurav Passi discusses revolutionizing customer service by eliminating "fear of reaching out" through Zingly Rooms, a collaborative, AI-powered platform. He highlights use cases, friction reduction, and future visions of AI-driven customer engagement, emphasizing seamless automation, human-AI collaboration, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Keywords

• Gaurav Passi
• Zingly AI
• Customer service
• Zingly Rooms
• Fear of reaching out
• Friction reduction
• AI-powered agents
• Relationship AI
• Customer satisfaction
• Digital transformation
• Gen AI
• Automation
• Collaborative platform
• Financial institutions
• Future of customer engagement

Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of Banking on Information. This is a spotcast. We're doing this on the spot. And today with me is Gaurav Passi from Zingli AI, founder and CEO. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Rutger. As always, we start with that very important question. Why do you do what you do? You know, for the last 20, 25 years, put your hat on as a consumer, the world of customer service has been very annoying. Anytime when we had to pick up the phone and call customer service, gosh, we have a term for that. We call it 4-0, which literally means fear of reaching out. And that fear of reaching out has become a vital part of our daily lives. Everybody fears it.

Nobody wants to pick up the phone and call, unless you really, really have to do. And this is just customer service. Think about situations of onboarding. Think about buying. It gets worse and worse. So this is the reason why Zingly was born. You want to make sure that we are putting things on equal pedestal, whether it's the customer, whether it's the brand. Everybody has the equal power to be part of the game. And when you put a collaborative space between the two, and then both are on the same level, then the customer service, the customer experience changes to the next level, which becomes extremely collaborative. So that's why we're doing what we're doing. So you're very passionate about good customer service and getting rid of that frustration that we've all experienced that at one point in our lives.

Absolutely. Destroy the fear of reaching out and provide just absolutely stunning customer service where the customers feel it's amazing. That's why Zing Lee. There you go. Well, that's good to know. So we now also know where Zing Lee comes from. Now, what use cases do you solve for? You know, what we're starting to see, talking about calling, one of our customers, they get about 1. 9 million to maybe 2 million calls a year in the call center. But they're getting about 2. 5 million visitors on their website and apps. So right now, everybody's thinking about Gen AI. Before Gen AI, the whole innovation was about digital transformation. What happened in digital transformation? You know, companies, banks, airlines, everybody invested heavily in these digital properties, websites, and apps.

And that's exactly why the traffic is kind of starting to emerge and move there. And so if you compare the traffic, when I said 1. 9 million calls in a call center, they're getting 2. 5 million visitors on their website and app. That's 10 times the traffic. So in that traffic, there are all kinds of traffic coming in. It could be new customers who are interested to buy products and services. It could be your competitors. It could be your existing customers. It could be people coming for customer service. It could be people coming for onboarding. So engaging that traffic right at the moment of truth when the intention is super high is what we really do. And from a use case standpoint, we are going from top of the funnel, which primarily involves customer acquisition.

So if you start thinking about large banks, you think about regional banks, credit unions, the visitor traffic on their website and apps is growing. So we engage with that traffic, not only on the website and apps, but we also proactively engage with them. We launch campaigns for them. We call them reviving the dormant base. Why so? Because most of the members for credit unions or customers for banks, they simply go on the website and apps, check their account balances and leave. And that's not a very engaging experience between both the customers and the banks. So we make it very, very super engaging for them. If you're on the website, you're checking your account balance and maybe your money is better off being in a money market account or you deserve to get a HELOC or you have an equity line that you should be going towards or there's a need for lending.

So we start to engage the customers in that format, which leads not only to higher wallet share, but also a very, very easy smooth way to get these products and services and easy onboarding. Right now I always get very frustrated with your earlier point that when I talk to my bank, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing-right? I go on the app, then I chat with them, then I walk by my branch, and I walk into branches: 'Hey, I have one more question!' And then the branch seems to be clueless about what I just discussed with the bank. So how do you help? How does Zingly help with that dysfunction? That's a great question, Rutger. So if you back up, you will notice that globally there are about 5.

5 billion consumers, but there are only 16 to 17 million customer service agents. That's a big difference. Even if you do a small little math, you're like, 'How can 17 million agents serve 5. 5 billion consumers?' But if you change the whole dynamic and play the game of opposites, and you put a very simple technology interface in the hands of the consumers, where they are more in control, more in power, they feel like they can easily engage, the platform is very transparent. Whether it's after hours, during hours, before hours, it's very, very easy for them to engage. So, for that, we created this new patented technology. We call it Zingly Rooms. It's 24/ 7 open.

It's a very collaborative space between a customer and a brand where you can come in anytime you want, whether you're anonymous completely because you're a visitor, not a customer yet, or you're authenticated because you're a customer. In either case, our technology engages with them. Once you touch the tech, it's always persistent in nature. And you can go anywhere from text. to chat to voice to video, you can come back, You can make your way back. The context always stays in a single place called rooms. You could be exchanging documents. You could be exchanging media, video, files. A lot of our customers use us for DocuSigning as well because you are part of an onboarding process and maybe the process needs DocuSign. So when all the activities come into a single place, nothing gets lost.

And it's really the friction which is the enemy. And our idea is to destroy and kill that friction. So in that example that you mentioned, if everything would have been in the room, the branch would have known exactly what I was just talking about in my chat with the app. And not only the customer, even if the rep and the agent keeps changing every single time, it won't matter because whether it's the customer, whether the reps are changing, or whether a new advisor is coming in, if all the data is in one place and it doesn't disappear, no matter who comes in, everybody can see the data. So in the olden days, If you call me and I don't know the answer to that question, I'll transfer your call.

And when I transfer the call, the new person comes in and the data gets lost. In our case, because all the data is in one place, people are coming to that room as opposed to the room getting transferred like a hot potato or whatever you want to call it. Hot potato. Hot potato is a better way to say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. No, I think that is really, really valuable. So when you put that system in place where you have these rooms, how do your customers get value from that? What is the benefit for them? Key, like I said, is friction. So what we're finding out is that one of our customers that is using us for asset consolidation. So they have a very defined process.

Example, you move your job and now you're getting a 401k, but you also have previous 401ks that are with other institutions. Now you want to consolidate the asset, so it's a massive amount of deposits that increase if you actually bring your previous assets to it. So in their case, they had about a, a longer period of time like about 60 days of process that was needed to get all the assets consolidated, right? It's not the time that the assets take to get consolidated, right? It's the friction. Yeah, you'll come in, you'll make a call, then I'll send you an email; email gets lost, so we really just kill that friction. Yep! And from 60 days, we brought it down to like 14 days.

Immediately things change, and they could do it right on their website; they could do it after hours; they could do it before hours; and they could exchange documents-there's so much documentation exchange as you can imagine in this thing, yeah! So that kind of high-level, high-engagement personalization, very relationship-oriented is what what the technology did for them. And what does that do to customer satisfaction? I can only imagine that it's positive! But what kind of metrics are you seeing? So we actually um look at customer sentiment very very closely, yeah! If you look at our application, right on the top, There's a bar that constantly shows how the customer is feeling in every single conversation. So the sentiment is right top and center. Not only you as a customer can see it, but me as a brand can also see it.

Even the supervisor or CEO of a bank can come in at any time, look at the app and say, hey, I have six topics trending on my website and app. One of them is onboarding. One of them is checking accounts. One of them could be lending. And I can see how all my customers are doing in lending, what their sentiment is, where they are in the process, if they're hung up somewhere, where they're hung up. Maybe it's a training issue that needs to be given. So it's a very informative platform end-to-end. Like I said, if you kill friction, magic happens. So reduction in friction. Better customer satisfaction, deeper insights. So that's all very, very valuable. I like to do this thing called future stacking, which is let's think.

We don't know what the future is going to hold, but we can think about it, what a possible future can look like. So let's think about 10 years out. So 2034, what does the world look like? And how does a system like you have, how does sort of customer engagement live in 2034? I think we gotta be under, somebody's gotta be under big. Giant of a rock, if you haven't heard the term Gen AI yet. So Zingly from design, even today, we have put three things together, which is the Gen AI, the data, and the humans. And we did it because we feel like, you know, human has to be in the loop. We do feel like as the time will advance, let's just go 10 year time that you talked about.

The role of AI is going to get bigger and better. Even today, we are handling 70% of these customer inquiries, automating them where a human is not needed. Ten years from now, the numbers will increase, but the humans are going to get very adapted to AI machines and technologies doing it. What we are doing today is a small version of it because we're helping a brand, a customer, a bank at a time. What Zingly sees the future to be. And Zingly's vision is to be the AI agent for a consumer for all the brands that they want to interact with. So whether those brands are your banks, multiple banks, whether those brands are your retail companies or your healthcare companies, empowering us as a consumer through a technology like Zingly to go and interact with any brand you want.

And let that AI agent take that. Take that big issue out of your hands. Make your relationship with brands better. Advise you back what technologies you should be buying, what products and services you should be buying, what will make your life better, make your life easier. Obviously great for brands as well because now they're able to sell you more, put you the right technology, understand what your needs are, and position it the right way. So I see a world where we'd never have to call an 800 number ever. Our kids should never be doing that thing. That's one gift we should all pass to our legacy, like never call 800 numbers and have a technology like this. Right.

So if you see that future, what do we need to do today to get ready for that, to be ready in 10 years to be there? What do we need to do today? We did a very big announcement today at Zingly, where for the last six months we've been working with one of our customers, again, a large financial institution. Yep. Who was very interested in Gen AI. Everybody's heard the Klarna story. And everybody said, 'I want a Klarna type of customer relationship, customer service.' So did they. But Klarna had their own team, own technology, own IT that built it. Not everybody has a wherewithal. So at Zingly, we have been really, really focused for a few years now to build that technology on AI and AI agents.

So we just today announced three big components. One is a full AI agent, meaning you as a consumer can absolutely talk to an AI agent. And it answers your questions. It takes you on a journey, knows exactly what your need is. It doesn't frustrate you. There's no fear of reaching out. You can do after hours, before hours, during hours, whatever. It knows what you want to accomplish, understands your goal, and it can actionize for you. But there are a lot of times where AI falls short. So even if 70% of the times you're meeting that target, 30% of the times when you really want to talk to someone. So we have a second engine that is called Relationship. AI, which I believe is a magical engine that understands when to bring a human in the loop.

And again, going back to friction, AI should not create friction. AI should always, or any technology for that matter, the purpose is to destroy friction. So the moment our AI understands there's any kind of friction coming in or could come in, it understands when to bring a human in the loop. Sometimes a high-value customer, sometimes in a high-friction product or service. So that does that. And a third component is obviously when a human comes in a loop, making them very, very aware of all the situations, especially when all the data is in one place, it just becomes a very real-time information that the agent and the reps can help the customers with. So starting today. We feel like human in the loop is a super important thing in AI.

And we are seeing our customers are very receptive to that. They want that kind of technology, but they want a lot of automation in there too. But when you put all three things together, I think that is the right starting point today. Wow. So it sounds like the future is already a little bit here. Future is already a little bit here. That's pretty amazing. Well, let's wrap up on that. That is a perfect spot to wrap up on. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. This was another episode of Banking on Information. Until next time, choose to be curious. Thank you, Rutger.