Operational Excellence: Cyara’s Impact on Global Contact Centers

Ready to revolutionize your understanding of customer experience? Join us as we chat with the visionary founder of Cyara, an AI-powered platform that's transforming how businesses interact with their customers. Discover how Cyara bridges the gap between conversational AI bots and human agents, ensuring seamless customer interactions regardless of the communication channel. From the founder's early days working with NEC and Genesis to identifying a critical need in automated customer experience testing, this episode is packed with insights into the evolution of customer experience technologies—from natural language IVRs to cutting-edge AI and large language models.

Explore the competitive landscape of global contact centers and see how Cyara stands out with its tech-agnostic approach. Our guest shares compelling real-world stories of how Cyara has delivered significant operational benefits, such as addressing capacity constraints and automating thousands of test scenarios. You'll hear about unique challenges faced during peak times like Black Friday and how Cyara's independent stance gives it an edge in an industry dominated by giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. Don't miss this episode if you want to learn how Cyara is leading the charge in customer experience innovation.

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey everyone, really exciting discussion today with an innovator in the world of AI and automation and customer experience. That's Ciara. Look, how are you? I'm good. Evan, how are you? I'm well? Thanks so much for joining. Really intrigued by the work you're doing, your vision mission. Let's maybe start with some introductions. Who's Ciara? And tell us about the evolution and a little bit of your story.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Sure, thanks for asking. So Ciara is an AI-enabled CX transformation platform for customer experience, helping transform and assure customer experiences across what we see today, which are conversational AI bots, llm bots, ivrs, contact centers and people that you talk to in a contact center over all these different communications channels, right to, potentially, customer service agents who might be sitting in their home office or in a large enterprise. And our job is to make sure that innovation keeps flowing through to customer experience and it's delivered flawlessly across all these different channels, no matter where you are located geographically. And, in addition to that, we do that in a vendor agnostic way, so we're not tied to any specific vendor. So it gives our customers the ultimate flexibility in picking whichever vendors they want and making it all come together seamlessly.

Speaker 1: 1:33

And just a little bit about myself, sorry. No, it's a fantastic mission and, yeah, tell us about your journey over the last number of years with Ciara.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Yeah, so I'm a bit ancient. I got into this industry in about 1996, right, and it's fascinated me because I'm a bit of a tech nerd, a tech geek. I did engineering and I also wanted to do my own startup, so I got into this tech world. I used to work for tech companies like NEC, and then I worked for Bayer, a company called Genesis, which is a leader in customer experience, and while I was at Genesis I used to run the pre-sales group or the solutions consulting group, and I noticed a pattern, and that was whenever Genesis used to bring new technologies to market.

Speaker 2: 2:22

Whenever they deployed it, you know, invariably the experience wasn't great, it used to fail and I noticed a gap in the market where customers couldn't really test what they were going to put in ahead of time the changes that we're going to make and so customers had to pay the price right, Because everything was done manually. So Ciara as a concept idea came to me where, hey, imagine if you had a cloud-based SaaS platform that you could effectively consume on demand and you were able to automatically test and assure all these customer journeys end-to-end, without the actual customer being impacted. How cool would that be? So we started Ciara in about 2006, and it's been an amazing journey to where we are today, which is the world leader in this space that we operate in.

Speaker 1: 3:14

Fantastic. So this is well before the current hype around LLMs and chat, gpt and Gen AI in Gen AI. So tell us about your early days with Ciara, what the challenges you were facing and some of the you know technologies you brought to bear to overcome them.

Speaker 2: 3:37

Yeah, thanks, you know as the cliche goes. You know the business plans that you write and what you think is going to happen never actually happens, right? So you've been in the tech industry and B2B SaaS for 30 years, so you know what I'm talking about. So when we first started Ciara, the big thing then was natural language communication. So IVRs people hated using them. It was like dead by a touchstone, right. And so this new language understanding where you can just communicate with your natural voice was the new thing. And so we thought, hey, you know, this would be a great disruptor in the market. It's going to completely wipe out IVRs and take over. So we built Ciara to essentially herald in that new era of speech-based communications. Guess what we're in? 2024 and DTMF IVIs are still here today, right.

Speaker 2: 4:25

But having said that and you know it's a big part of our business and having said that, conversational AI is also here and conversational voice bots are here, and you know we find that what was really interesting in the customer experience space is the legacy technologies still play a massive part in the communications apparatus that any enterprise has, including email, chat you know your mobile devices and in person, right. And so enterprises have to serve all these communications platforms and also adapt to the new ones coming in. And, as you said, the world right now is going through a massive transformation with AI, with LLMs especially, and for those of us who have been in AI for a long time, you knew that AI is not new. It was there 50, 60 years ago. I did my engineering thesis in AI right, but in 2021, with large language models, it changed the world completely, and so now everyone is deploying AI because, you know, we're still learning a lot more about it, but what you can do with it now has increased enormously.

Speaker 2: 5:33

And what's really good about customer experience and CX, which is an industry that I love, is anytime there is a change in the way that consumers want to engage with enterprises. They have to adapt and they have to embrace these new technologies, whether it's social, whether it's mobile or whether it's AI. They have to embrace it and they have to deliver it flawlessly. And this is where we come in so we are able to help them, you know, not only deliver on what they have today, but also incorporate these new channels into their practice so that they can deliver an entire customer journey across all these different channels seamlessly. And that's where the gaps are right, like it's the connections between these two channels that sometimes fail.

Speaker 2: 6:18

I imagine I'm sure you've been in situations where you've connected to a bot, you've asked it questions. It hasn't answered what you really wanted, and then you go hey, get me to that agent, right. And then you're furiously trying to get to a human, but you get to the human after waiting for 20, 30, maybe minutes or something, and then you have to repeat everything you just did right and you go oh my God, we're living in 2024. Why hasn't this been sorted? Well, this is what we're trying to solve right.

Speaker 1: 6:51

It's a very complex problem, um, and it's very hard to do, so hopefully we're making a difference. Oh, it's really really interesting opportunity and you know there are so many new tools at your disposal. Uh, you know ai and automation tools and new, new APIs and emerging technologies of all kinds. So how are you applying these different technologies to enhance? You know CX, you know what's in the shed, as it were, in terms of the tools that you're bringing to bear. Are these technologies you're developing in-house? Are these third-party technologies you're sort of integrating into the experience for your customers? Maybe describe your approach to solving these problems.

Speaker 2: 7:31

Oh, thanks, evan. I think that this is one of my favorite questions because, you know, we're using AI internally, so we haven't built our own large foundational model, but we're using third-party to bring AI and it's infused in an entire platform. You know, when it comes to reporting or effectively trying to predict some, I guess, outcomes, we're using that to sort of help us do all that right. I just saw an amazing data that you know we're using to really undo natural language reporting for one of our products. So it's really embracing AI, not only from a product perspective, but from an engineering perspective, from marketing, from sales. I think it's impacted everybody's life and any enterprise that's not using it, I think is going to be toast or left behind. So we're embracing it, but I mean that's applicable to most companies out there in business today.

Speaker 2: 8:29

However, what's really unique about us is we are also helping test and monitor and help enterprises with their AI lifecycle. So what I mean by that is any enterprise today who wants to communicate with their customers and we've seen that with our customer base, which tends to be really the champions of CX in the industry, you know. So it's the you know top three or top five innovative companies in the world, the top six out of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies in the world, top four of the top five tech companies in the world. So these companies are really at the forefront of innovation and what they're doing is implementing AI. But it's a bit risky for them, right, because they cannot just put something out there. We know what happens when you don't test and put things out there, like in the market. I think we've all experienced that, just even recently, with even some of the biggest tech firms in the market.

Speaker 2: 9:19

Right, so, effectively, we are helping them by coming up with products that are letting them manage the complete lifecycle of the AI deployment, and what I mean by that is our body and product and its capabilities, which is part of our CR platform, enables companies to benchmark different conversational bots right To see which is the best bot that suits them, because every bot vendor will claim their bot is the bots. Right To see which is the best bot that suits them, because every bot vendor will claim their bot is the best right. So how do you pick and choose, right, so we can actually benchmark these bots. Then you can see how they perform side by side. Then you can build a complete library of scenarios that customers might want to ask your enterprise in a flash right, and we use AI to do that Effectively.

Speaker 2: 10:08

It's like generating these massive amounts of scenarios and they are literally massive so you just cannot do this manually to generate these, and then we can curate which scenarios you want to use to essentially assure your journey, and that also helps. I mean that also runs automatically as part of a CI, cd or DevOps platform, so you're essentially using automation where you would have to do things manually. And a large Canadian bank said to us that hey, if it wasn't for Bodium, they're not comfortable putting any new releases of their chatbot to market because they just don't know which journeys haven't been tested, so they're taking risks. So we help automatically test all those journeys and then we can also monitor in production so effectively. It just gives this level of comfort and confidence to these enterprises to say, hey, I'm embracing new technologies, I'm getting the best out of the technologies that I have and I can manage this lifecycle and keep pace with the customer's demands so that we're ahead in our game.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Fantastic, great customer example. There you have a very diverse set of customers across different industries. Where do you think you're making the most impact? Do you have a sweet spot, or do you want to call out a particular favorite customer, favorite child, as it were? I guess they're all looking for help with not just enhancing CX but helping with business outcomes as well not just enhancing CX, but helping with business outcomes as well, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:43

So what I love about CX as well is it's a horizontal market, right? So we don't build specific solutions for a specific customer. So we cross-platform, cross-industry, and so let me just give you a few examples of how customers are using our platform in a very effective way. So we got Forrester to do a you know what they call a TES study with our customers to just understand the ROI that they get, and it's 334 percent return on investment within six months. So this thing really, once you put it in, is able to essentially just do things automatically for you. So firstly, with that you get 90 plus 95 percent coverage of all the scenarios that you might want to test against before you go to production. That's happening on an ongoing basis and it's working 24 by 7 for you. The other thing that does is it helps your teams who were sitting there doing this manually, building scripts for testing manually, then running them manually and then assessing them manually. Now it's done automatically. They can really focus on the root cause of hey, what is causing issues? Is it third parties? Is it something within the code that we've written? They can really optimize and accelerate the development and QA process right and in production, once the solution's been deployed.

Speaker 2: 13:05

Typically, more than 50% of contact centers typically have the customer telling the enterprise when they have a problem, right. So it's not that the enterprise doesn't want to help you and give you the best customer experience, they just don't know. Because there's so many third parties involved in the middle, they just don't have visibility of what the customer is experiencing. So it's only when the customer contacts them and say, hey, did you know? I got dropped when I was trying to make this call, or your bot froze, or something like that, then they go oh my God, yeah, that happened. So if you have CR, we're able to pick these instances from the outside and because we pretend and emulate the customer interacting with the enterprise, so we're able to say, hey, this is what the customer experience was and you can make these changes and you can detect issues proactively and you can roll back the changes or make amendments to the platform to make sure it works. So these are typically some of the use cases that our customers use.

Speaker 2: 13:59

So let me just talk about some of our customers, right? So we tend to be mainly in the large B2C market of customers. So any customer who has a lot of consumers contacting them digitally is a perfect customer for Ciara, and that's because you know they're using all the traditional things that you would use your web browser, your phone, your email and clients and things like that. And what happens is let's talk about three scenarios. So the first scenario is you're launching a new product, you've got storm season coming in or you're doing enrollments for health, multiple people are going to contact you at the same time and your systems have to stand up to the stress that they put on during the sale or during any of these events happening. So we're the largest platform in the world with over 200 points of presence that can generate interactions globally, and some of the biggest companies in the world use this before any launch event to make sure the retail centers, the contact centers, are going to hold up to this avalanche of scenarios that come in right and effectively. It's like a massive load test that runs end-to-end, from when the customer places the interaction, you know, from when the customer places the interaction on the website or maybe the shopping cart contacting the retail center, all the way to when they're picking the phone up to ring the branch or the retail center all the way to talking to a customer service agent who may be remotely located in Bangalore or in the US or wherever they might be, and so we're able to test that end-to-end before the event happens. And so a lot of customers use that to make sure you know before storm season everything's working well before a launch process, everything's going to hold together.

Speaker 2: 15:48

That's one scenario, right. The other scenario and we can rinse and repeat that to identify issues, and we've done that many times One example is one customer found their 50% capacity compared to what they thought they had right. So they went back to the provider and said hey, you know, I thought we were going to get double what happened here and there was some configuration issue that they fixed. Another scenario is when you know you just get mad, the platform just doesn't scale and just drops. So you know you have a massive loss of inbound and then essentially goes to a backup center and that doesn't work. That can cause scenarios to be like crazy bad. When you know you go live. So that's one scenario.

Speaker 2: 16:26

Another scenario that you know the customers use our platform for is regression testing. So just imagine you have to build, let's say, a million scenarios that you want to do manually. I mean, you know you'd have to hire an army of people that's what they used to do in the past just to build these out, whereas with Sierra it can be done automatically. So, effectively, you're getting these scenarios running constantly, like we have customers running thousands of scenarios in Sierra on a daily basis and what they do is any change they make. They're not going to test that change, but they've tested all the thousands of scenarios that they've built, which we call customer journeys, in an automated way, and it's highlighting any defects that might pop up. Right, so it's automating that testing cycle. And so we've had customers who have said to us look, you've saved us 70 person years, right, by doing this automatically, because they just could not get that coverage. So that's another scenario.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Third scenario is when you're in production and you've got customers calling in from all over, right. We've got customers who are large institutions, who've got whistleblower lines in multiple countries, so they need to make sure that customers are able to get through. We've got retailers, for example, and service providers who really need their service to be up, and sometimes what happens is you just there's intermittent faults that happen. So I'll give you an example of intermittent faults A customer of ours had a 3 pm problem. 27% of their callers used to get hung up on at 3 pm and they did not know why. Right, so, because they could not recreate that scenario that used to happen at 3 pm. So, with Ciara monitoring this situation, at that time they realized that there was a backup that was running at 3 pm that caused all the systems to be at a strain and we were able to replicate that as the specific root cause of that issue and then they were able to solve it right.

Speaker 2: 18:13

Another customer, for example, during Black Friday, identified within two minutes of us monitoring the platform that the POS system you know wasn't working and this was a Black Friday sale. So you can imagine, once you lose that time of sales, you know you've lost it forever. We were able to detect it too, because we're monitoring the POS system's lines and we identified that you know it was deteriorating. And, fair enough, they had put a new connector between the POS system and the backend and that was not working under strain. So they were quickly put a patch in, save millions of dollars, admitted to their Q4 reporting in the, I guess, reporting for the board, and that's how impactful it was to the company. So you combine all of these things under a single platform. These are sort of the benefits we've been able to give to our customers.

Speaker 1: 19:05

How super impressive. So describe the current contact center landscape from your perspective. Increasingly, we're getting lots of new money and startups pouring in. Even the big tech giants are getting in the game. Amazon Connect and Microsoft and Google have various offerings. How do you see yourself partnering or competing with all of these different players out there, and who do you sort of work with on the go-to-market side?

Speaker 2: 19:36

Yeah, great question. And yeah, this space is hot, right, as you just mentioned, microsoft just came in with the co-pilot, right, we've got Google in there. We've got Zoom this is Zoom's contact center We've got Amazon's already in there. So you know it's here, right, big tech is here in this space because, as you mentioned talking earlier, customer experience is a prime area for this disruption to occur. So you know what's unique about Ciara and what's our superpower? Our superpower is we're tech agnostic, right, and we're independent.

Speaker 2: 20:10

So enterprises have been in this game for a very long time. You know they've seen vendors many vendors come and go, especially the large ones saying, hey, you know, don't worry about it, you know we're so-and-so, we've got your back right, so just trust us. And they've lived through times where they've done that and it hasn't worked out. So one large tech company came to the space and they actually had a chat with me and said, look like, hey, you know what you do is pretty interesting. We'd love to, you know, partner with you. But, by the way, if you're not microservices and you're not cloud-based, you know we'll develop our own solution and we'll go to market and we've done that in the past. So it's one of those scenarios where you know you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So we did partner with them, right, and things were going well. And they went to the customer and said hey, you know what, we can actually develop this ourselves and you know we can take care of it, so you don't need to, you know, have CR in the picture. And our customer said to them hey, you know, we've heard this many times before we need an independent company that is going to validate what you do. Otherwise, it's like getting the fox to guard the hen house, right? So of course, everything's going to be great if you ask them for what it is that they're doing.

Speaker 2: 21:17

So now that we have a brand in the market that is recognized as the world's number one platform for CX, assurance and transformation, customers are using us to validate these enterprises and most often, validate all these tech providers, and most often what happens is there's more than one right. So they need to make a comparison between the two and make sure that you know they're picking the right partner with the right technology, and once they deploy it, we have integrations to all these partners. They also are resellers, so they're also bringing a solution to market and so effectively. It's a really nice coexisting ecosystem where the customer benefits because they're getting independent validation and assurance that things are going to work.

Speaker 2: 22:01

The tech company that's engaging with us and also reselling our platform to the customer also gets the benefit of making sure that technology is working. They can point to a third party and say, hey, this is actually what's happening and they're wanting to upsell other products and services to the customer. So nothing better than having your technology work better, faster, right, so that you can get there. And the third thing is like I guess you know we do this and this is our sole capability and our mission, whereas large tech have multiple different divisions doing other things. So we're a purpose-built platform. So if you take all these components together and put it together, it's like a really nice ecosystem that works well for the customer and the consumer and the tech companies involved. And just to give you some names, we're partnered with Amazon, we're partnered with Google, we're partnered with the company. We've got, as I mentioned, four of the top five tech companies, so it's been an amazing journey for us.

Speaker 1: 23:07

It sounds like it Wow, it's been an amazing journey for us. It sounds like it Wow, it's really exciting. And you're a global company, despite you're headquartered in Australia. You're in Australia, I believe. Yes, what's that like in terms of operating globally and having service and support around the globe Must be challenging, but exciting. I'm sure you have a lot of air miles on Qantas at the moment.

Speaker 2: 23:31

Yeah, you know, somebody said I love your travel much, and I said no, and then I'm platinum, you know, in the thing, and I'm basically I've got a lot of miles, a lot of companies. Look, australia is a wonderful place to live. It's a fantastic test market, you know, when you want to try things out, and I think that's sort of what's helped us, because the demographics are very similar to the largest market in the world, which is the US. And you know, you're in the software SaaS game and, as you know, evan, you cannot be the biggest fish in your little pond. You've got to be the biggest fish in the ocean, right. So it's a matter of scale and we wanted to take this innovation globally, which we did. So, yeah, life is global.

Speaker 2: 24:09

Now, you know, our biggest team is in Europe. We have a huge presence in the US, we have a huge presence in India, we've got a presence in Australia from a legacy perspective and things like that. So it just means, you know, meetings are very common like this at early in the morning or late in the evening, because you've got to cover the global time zones. But I think that's the new reality for a lot of companies these days, right, where you have to sort of be global because you want to optimize where your resources are located and at the same time serve a global market. So you know, we've got teams in various regions that can do the local supports sort of local servicing of our customers, but handle it from a global basis. So, yeah, a lot of travel, but thanks to Zoom, you know, it's made that a little easier.

Speaker 1: 25:01

It does indeed, and you know what's next when your customers are talking to you about their future in the next one, two, three years. What are they asking for? Where do you see this industry headed?

Speaker 2: 25:15

Oh well, you know it's all about AI, right? So effectively, that's where enterprises are. You know, every large enterprise that I'm aware of I've got Tiger teams working on this thing to understand this AI piece better. Obviously, there's a lot of hype around it. We're seeing the hype sort of come down a bit, you know, into reality.

Speaker 2: 25:35

I don't think the end state scenario of, you know, basic universal income and humans being completely free to do what they want because the bots are going to take care of it, is here anytime soon. However, it is going in that direction and I think as a society and humanity, we're going to have to work out what is our value at right Now. Fortunately, bots don't have a mind of their own and don't have ego, unless you've got some bad actors who program that in. But I think we're going to be in a new world, right. 70% of enterprise cost typically is in human labor, right, and essentially with contact centers. There's 17 million plus contact center agents out there, right, and they're a huge cost in the customer service equation. So every enterprise out there wants to deliver the best outcome for their customers at the lowest possible cost, right? So I think they're all looking at these technologies, especially AI and digitization, remote working, so they can, I guess, balance it by giving the best possible service for the lowest possible cost without compromising anything.

Speaker 2: 26:42

So I think what we're seeing is a proliferation of bot companies just exploding everywhere, right From the smaller ones to big tech and the large foundational models. I mean, as we know, in Hugging Face, there's over 300,000 bot providers out there. So what we're seeing is enterprises embracing AI. Customer experience is a core part of that and they're engaging with us. That's the fastest growing capability that we have in Ciara, which is an AI product, and solutions around that, not only for conversational AI, but for LLMs as well, and I think this is going to transform the CX industry and we are so proud to be associated and proud to be a part of it Exciting times and you're right in the middle of it.

Speaker 1: 27:28

So congratulations for that. And as we head into the summer months or winter months in your case what are you looking forward to? Any downtime or travel, or you're just onwards and upwards?

Speaker 2: 27:40

Oh, look, you know it's a nonstop game this year. I've been doing it for a very long time, so, yeah, for me it's more travel and seeing external stakeholders and things like that, which is what it's aligned to do, just like this. So that's what's on my plate, and the teams are busy making sure they are keeping pace with the technology and making sure our customers are happy and keeping pace with their innovations.

Speaker 1: 28:09

Fantastic. Well, well done. Thanks for shedding some light on this space. Very insightful commentary and good luck on the next wave.

Speaker 2: 28:19

Thanks, evan, it was a pleasure.

Speaker 1: 28:21

Thanks Alok, and thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to chatting soon. Thanks Thanks, alok, take care, take care. Bye-bye.