Vasili Triant's Top 5 Tips for Modernizing Customer Interactions

The following is an excerpt from The Modern Customer Podcast’s “How to Modernize Customer Iterations for the Smartphone Era With Vasili Triant.” You can listen to the full episode here. 

Blake Morgan: Vasili, welcome to the Modern Customer Podcast, all the way from Texas. Thank you for being here with me today. Today on the show, we are talking about modernizing the customer experience and providing digital and in-context information through the contact center. We’re talking with Vasili Triant, the COO of UJET. For those of my audience who don’t know UJET, can you give us a 50-foot view of what UJET actually does?

Vasili Triant: Absolutely. UJET is a modern enterprise-grade cloud contact center solution that specializes in scale, security, and then customer experience transformation applications that really connect consumers where they’re at for brands, and today I’m going to be sharing a few of the ways UJET enables modern, seamless customer experiences. 

5 Ways Brands Can Modernize Customer Experiences

Tip #1: Blend channels for seamless support experiences

Vasili Triant: UJET’s contact center technology enables what we call channel blending, so we meet customers where they are within a brand’s application. 

Imagine you booked a flight in an airline’s app, but you now have a problem and you need to cancel or reschedule, and you go to the section in the mobile app or the website that says, “Contact us.” 

You’ll then see options to connect via phone, email, chat, or maybe SMS. But then the app pushes you out to your phone’s dialer, or you have to pick up your phone and dial a 1-800 number, or go to a chat widget, or send them a text message from your phone’s messaging app. 

That company is pushing you to all these different places, and when you finally connect with that airline, there’s no context. No one knows how long you’ve been spending in one place or another. Maybe they identify you by your phone number, but all that rich information that’s already in-web or in-app is lost.

What UJET does is push all of that information into the app, so when you click “contact support,” we pass all that rich contextual information over to the agent and then the agent is much more informed and able to quickly assist the customer without wasting their time.

So, instead of saying, “I’m Vasili Triant. Here’s my mother’s maiden name and the last four digits of my social security number,” I can authenticate via touch or face ID. I can share photos, videos, and real-time information with the agent from either web or mobile directly in the app. So it makes your support experience more rich.

Tip #2: Use context to predict customer intent

Vasili Triant: With the majority of the brands we deal with – insurance companies, banks, hospitality, even retail – when you call in, they barely know who you are. They might know your name by your phone number, but then they want to authenticate you. Then the agent asks, “What are you calling about?” 

Maybe the best information they have is the last action you took on their site or in the app, based on a purchase or some type of transaction history. But everything that you’ve done on mobile or on the web, and the stuff you’re doing in real-time – the agent doesn’t have that information.

If I knew that you already spent 15 minutes on a support page, or you’re looking for refunds, UJET would just route you directly to refunds instead of wasting time asking what you need help with. And the reason why the standard support experience is so painful is that we haven’t really broken that boundary of data collection in support interactions.

Tip #3: Focus on creating positive experiences

Vasili Triant: The consumer has been forgotten in all the marketing messages out there. We’ve focused on the brand. We’ve focused on bringing everything together for an agent. You know what they say: “Happy Agent; Happy Customer.”

But, trust me. I’ve called call centers before and had a happy agent on the line, and I’ve been still been frustrated with my experience. It doesn’t matter how happy the agent is if the customer is frustrated.

Most people nowadays are choosing to stay with brands based on positive experiences. They might buy something initially based on technology or marketing message, but they choose to stay with the brand based on the experience. If you don’t get that positive experience – we have so many choices nowadays, and they’re all at our fingertips, I’ll just go somewhere else. I can go somewhere else to find a hotel or to find a plane ticket, or I can go to another bank at the drop of a hat.

The key for brands is to figure out how they want to engage with their customers, and then make them feel as though you know them as a person. 

Tip #4: Ditch outdated technology

Vasili Triant: If you really think about it, the majority of experiences consumers have with brands are negative because the technologies these brands are using are antiquated. Most of what’s out there, still, are on-premise technologies that were built in the ‘70s and ‘80s. 

Yet, we’re in an era now where rich data is passed every second through our mobile phones and web, and we just haven’t harnessed that data in this industry.

In everything else we do, in everything else, like if you went on your phone right now, Blake, and you searched up "Greek Island" on Facebook, everywhere you go after that, in your browser, you’re going to get Greek Island ads popping up and travel ads popping up, and there’s all that data that has been grabbed from one place and extrapolated to all these others to give you what they think you need.

We’re not doing that in Customer Experience yet, and until we put the right applications in the right places, it’s not just about cloud transformation, we actually have to transform the experience based on where you and I as consumers are at, and it just hasn’t all been connected yet. 

Tip #5: Move to the cloud

Blake Morgan: I’m reading a description of UJET, and it says that you power the world’s largest elastic CCaaS tenant at 22,000 agents globally. What does “CCaaS” mean?

Vasili Triant: The acronym is CCaaS, which stands for Cloud Contact Center as a Service. It essentially is the nomenclature for Contact Center Technology moved from prem-based to cloud-based. One of the problems that exists in this space is, amongst many, is actually scale.

The idea is, you can just pick up your stuff that’s on-prem and move it to the cloud. But what has really sparked a lot of the adoption has been small to medium-sized businesses. Where the big growth is going forward is the medium-to-large-sized businesses, but the ability for companies to serve that gets hindered because their applications can’t scale. 

Now, when I talk about scale, I’m not talking about a number of agents on the platform. Scale meaning you can have an event any given day of the week, and you’ll have an influx of contacts or transactions. How do you deal with that influx? And you need something that is elastic and scalable at a moment’s notice.

Blake Morgan: Yes. That’s what I hear about the major benefits of moving to the cloud are the scalability, being able to scale up or down. It seems like that’s been a big issue right now. Because of COVID, there have been spikes in contact center volume, and it just seems to me like companies have not been scaling up quickly enough because you hear, ”Due to higher than normal call volume, your wait time could be up to an hour.” That’s my favorite.

Vasili Triant: Yeah. Some of those are that the business didn’t staff enough agents, meaning they can’t handle the actual call volume, or their agents weren’t enabled to work remotely because their software is on-premises. 

The really big piece of all of this is getting contact center leaders to take risks on changing the process. Don’t just move your technology to the cloud, but embrace technology that can help you transform your entire customer experience. 

Get more of Vasili Triant's advice on modernizing customer experiences by listening to the full episode below: