Rama Sreenivasan Interview - ceo of blitzz
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For most of us, there's no shortage of options to talk face to face with family or prospects while you're sitting at your desk. But what if you have tech support teams that work out of the office and in the field, or your customer support team can hear customers talk about the problem, but your team can't see it to help them solve it? Well, my guest today is Rama Sreenivasan, the co-founder, and Ceo of Blitz. They pioneered a remote visual communication tool to allow your support team to respond much more quickly and visually to get issues resolved without the need to send out a technician.
David Avrin: Hi! It's, David Everett. Thanks and welcome to the show today. You know as we're getting sort of post-pandemic, and I know these podcasts are a little bit evergreen. So you might be watching at different times. But we're coming into a different time. One of the things that I talk about when I'm working with audiences around the world, of course, is that the world has changed,
David Avrin: and your customers and clients, or patients or constituents, whatever you call whom you serve, Our expectations have changed. Um, you know I I I talk about that that prior to Covid I probably did one out of every five Conversations on Zoom today. It's nineteen out of twenty. When i'm talking to my wife and my kids on on the road, It's generally on face time because they're out doing whatever they're doing. And i'm on my phone and they're on their phone, and my kids are kind of spread all over the country as well one hundred and fifty,
David Avrin: but
David Avrin: in terms of of of tech tools to make and facilitate how we do what we do. There's been this this wonderful um explosion of new products and technologies to help us do what we do. So I want to get deeper into what the tech is. I want to talk about how that differentiates from the the tech that we are sort of familiar with with Zoom and some of those as well. But quick introduction for those who are watching the video version of this on my website or on my Youtube Channel as well.
David Avrin: My My guest today is is Ramas Srinivasan. He's co-founder, and Ceo at blitz it's a live remote.
David Avrin: I'm going to move this off the screen a live remote video support and collaboration platform that doesn't require an app download. That's a big deal as well. He's led the company through his initial exception launch and subsequent growth to several million video support minutes per month.
David Avrin: Major customers include Bmw. Ceiling, Fedex Rogers telecommunication and more,
David Avrin: and before he founded Blitz in two thousand and seventeen Ram has spent several years working as a scientist, an educator. His biggest joy comes from helping others solve their problems. He's got a Ph. D. And a masters in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland College Park, and also he's done Doctoral Research at Mit. Very impressive. Hey, welcome to this show,
Rama Sreenivasan: hey? Thanks for having me, David. I appreciate it. And uh, I've also been a big fan of not only your books, but your thought, leadership, and customer experience. So thanks. Oh, you are so nice to say whether that's true or not, and you're very well logo there with the with the Blitz logo on your
David Avrin: based out of Silicon Valley. Um, I I want to talk about this tech, and why why it's needed what it does differently than some of the existing tools which are just basic face to face communication, but I know it goes much deeper. But just give me a quick man and give me a little bit of your background. You were born in India, weren't you?
Rama Sreenivasan: That is correct. Yeah. A long, long time ago, born in India, and but I moved to the States for my master's grad school, essentially God Mount an Iit in India well known
Rama Sreenivasan: engineering institution in India, got my chemical engineering there, and moved to the States. Ah, in ninety six. I want to say yes, ninety, seven, yeah to the States, to my masters and worked, and Ph. D. And so on, and so forth, spent a lot of time in academia. And so And what was your What was your intent
Rama Sreenivasan: with the with, with the degree, with the ongoing education where you did. You have an entrepreneurial mindset? Was your intention to teach, because I know you've done that as well, because it's a pretty tough road to go into some new technologies, especially with existing players. Who's your intent going into school? And how did that change during school?
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah. Ah, you know one of the things that drew me to Academia was um the intellectual freedom that Academia gives you right, especially once you you're into research. There's a lot of um. There's very little money as a as a grad student, or or as a as a postdoc. But there's a tremendous amount of freedom to create and um to do magic inside the four walls of a lab, and so on. That was what
Rama Sreenivasan: drew me to academia and love for science, and luckily the money part did not bother me. Being poor. It did not bother me too much, because I also have this fond for backpacking and traveling around the world.
Rama Sreenivasan: That's another thing. You learn to live on very little money, you know, tenting hostels, and so
Rama Sreenivasan: the world becomes your playground at a very minimal cost. And I took that same thing into academia. And so that's how it started. That's how it really started. I got to do academia, and then, even in academia, the the latitude I had spoiled me to wanting to do something on my own rather than work for somebody else, and that's where entrepreneurship came in,
Rama Sreenivasan: and that's what? Ah! One thing led to another. The timing was right, and it was much later. Actually, it was only in two thousand and seventeen that I started. Blitz, after failing at an idea that I tried to do in one hundred and one
Rama Sreenivasan: in a university setting as well. That was all. That was my first um attempt at entrepreneurship within the university. But then I tried again in two thousand and seventeen, and to a a great co-founder, who was with me, and just so it's. It's all about finding the right person to endure the judge work. So to talk to me about the problem right? Of course, the the best solution. There's no shortage of solutions looking for problems. I saw a commercial
David Avrin: a few months ago. There was something called um fit vegetable spray. You're supposed to spray this on your vegetables to get them clean, because apparently water wasn't doing. And I looked at that. I looked at my wife, and i'm like. Well, there is a solution looking for a problem.
Rama Sreenivasan: Um, i'm not. And i'm and i'm not buying it literally, figuratively. Um! What was the need that you saw there's clearly been existing video platforms for some time, even prior to to to Covid. Of course, we were able to do this. What did you see, was the problem. And what was your aha moment in terms of a unique solution to solving that? And how does that differentiate?
Rama Sreenivasan: Right? So there were two problems. One was the lack of visual empathy in customer support,
Rama Sreenivasan: and the second problem was the even if a customer support team say a contact center of a telco that you get Internet from. For example, you call them up at a one eight hundred number. Even if they understood the power of video and visual empathy to look at your box.
Rama Sreenivasan: There was a technology problem of how would they get that done seamlessly without an app downward? Those were the two problems, and we'll take us back to the first problem. Define this one clearly, especially if you're in a position where you've had to look for c funding right,
David Avrin: said this a hundred times. So when you have terms of art like that visual empathy, define it for our audience.
Sure. So, um!
Rama Sreenivasan: When when You're calling about an equipment like a router, you know, or you,
Rama Sreenivasan: and any any piece of equipment that that is pretty expensive, and it's not about, you know, just dumping it into into a and getting a replacement very easily. Right? You're looking for customer support. And if you think about it even today, ninety nine percent of those calls one hundred and fifty,
Rama Sreenivasan: even though they're done from a smartphone which is capable of video. You're calling one hundred number, and the whole transaction is taking place over audio. They're going to say, Okay,
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, exactly. So they're going to try and imagine what you're looking at.
Rama Sreenivasan: Try and guide you to pressing buttons and tightening cables. Things like that.
Rama Sreenivasan: But that's not visual. Empathy. It's audio Empathy. You're trying to understand what the customer's going through as an agent. But there's no empathy really, visually right? So that's what we think about Empathy. It's about
Rama Sreenivasan: putting yourself in the other person's shoes and feeling what they're feeling
David Avrin: that visual empathy. How that that gets to the root of the problem faster,
Rama Sreenivasan: right? So they they're going to skip all those questions. It's pretty obvious they're going to see. So when the back camera turns on right, so the way it works right is the agent because of Blitz.
Rama Sreenivasan: Since you say you call David. You you know you call the Contact Center, and I'm the agent. I would send you a link immediately back to your smartphone, using technology. We have a bled, you would look at it,
Rama Sreenivasan: click on it without an app download. Your back camera turns on, and and and of course the agent rep you that, hey? The back camera is going to turn on just pointed at the equipment. We just want to look at the equipment. I'm. And the agent will say,
Rama Sreenivasan: Now, since I can look at it, I think we'll be able to get this sorted out pretty quickly without having a tech dispatch to your home. So once the camera comes on,
Rama Sreenivasan: you can use augmented reality to where you augment the reality with by drawing on the screen, and you can point to specific things like a press that. But so you're skipping through a lot of initial
Rama Sreenivasan: right? And of course it it answers the other question. I don't mean to skip ahead? Um that people have in their mind. It's like, Why can't you just do zoom or facetime? So tell me about some of the the the the technology and the capabilities that this has beyond simple face-to-face communication.
Rama Sreenivasan: Exactly so. Now if the contact center agent say the way most video calls work is through an app. If you think about zoom
Rama Sreenivasan: based, time is actually an app on the Ios platform. Right? So so for his fault when the agent calls he's going to. He's going to be on a computer,
Rama Sreenivasan: even if he had a zoom license. Let's say the whole company has a zoom license. So
Rama Sreenivasan: anybody inside the company would have access to zoom. But when he asks a customer,
Rama Sreenivasan: Hey, you're on your smartphone. You call me on my on your smartphone. You have zoom, or or webex, or teams on your smartphone. The chances are very low that they have one of them right, and then you and then the next question is going to be okay. Can you download? Go to the app store and download zoom? It's not gonna cost you anything to download a key version.
Rama Sreenivasan: It's you're you're getting them
David Avrin: for us. Yeah, you're adding complexity to the interaction.
Rama Sreenivasan: Whole idea is simplicity.
Rama Sreenivasan: Exactly. So instead of that, it's just a link sent to that caller to the customer with Sms. They click on the link to,
Rama Sreenivasan: and the whole video calling capability comes on the browser. It just opens up the browser. Nothing to download, and you are connected. In fact, it was a customer, a large telco who is spending fifteen frustrating minutes to get it. Ah, their customers to download an app like zoom teams or webex. And they switch to Blitz because it took them eight seconds to start a video call and get get it done with.
Rama Sreenivasan: And that was transformational for them
David Avrin: absolutely well. And we know it with with Cx because of richer, as part of it is, How are we? We're seeing organizations working to shave um even on the ux side. Shave tenths of seconds off interactions, how fast we get it, and and I would assume that many of these cases, if they're calling tech support um, and that's one side we're going to talk about some of the the remote things as well is, they're already at a level of frustration.
Rama Sreenivasan: And the last thing we want to do There's a reason why they're calling because they're frustrated by something. And last thing we want to do is exacerbate that by creating a whole new level of of complexity, and especially as seniors and others who are less familiar with technology.
Rama Sreenivasan: Right? Right? You're absolutely right. Yeah. And even with an app free uh technology, right? I mean initially, when we started out we actually focused on the population. That was
Rama Sreenivasan: more open to these kind of technologies. And then they realized how simple it was. And then they started like the Telco firm that we worked with. Ah, initially, they said, Okay. But let's take it even to a Let's make it like they were training their agents to decide which customer to use this technology on initial.
Rama Sreenivasan: And then they realized it was so easy that they would dare to use it even on seniors who were not technologies having all they had to do was click a link, and they were blown away. How how simple it was!
David Avrin: You said there were two aspects, so one of them was the visual empathy. And tell me about the second one again.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah. So the second aspect is that is, that is what you brought up right? The the the necessity for doing it painlessly, right? So everybody is used to zoom team and webex. We came up with our technology where it was app free. So those were the two pain points that we solved,
Rama Sreenivasan: even so that my my point is that even if the company realized the power of video, they did not. Even today they don't know that you can actually do a lot of companies. Don't know that you can do a video call without an app download.
Rama Sreenivasan: The top of the mind is they're going to try and get their it. Department to have zoom licenses, or webex, or teams licenses, or one of the other app licenses, and they' to try and get their customer to download that after in the call, and then fail miserably, and then the real. Then Then their paypoint is okay. Video did not work because I can't get them to download it now
Rama Sreenivasan: right right. Isn't it interesting also that some organizations things like Microsoft teams, I mean the the platforms are created to keep others out
Rama Sreenivasan: right right. I mean it's meant to be an internal network, and they were having other people in, and they're They're not expecting that problems, you know I did over Covid. I mean most of what I do is I travel pretty extensively. I'm actually heading overseas tomorrow, but over Covid I did eighty. Seven
David Avrin: virtual presentations on a webcam in my basement. No, I had a whole studio. It wouldn't look like my basement, but over that time I counted it up. I did sixteen different platforms
Rama Sreenivasan: right, and the level of frustration. Were somebody else on the call that couldn't get in because they were trying to download something and getting it to tie um. I I think there's this interesting dichotomy, and I love your thoughts on this over Covid. I think we we became much more familiar with
Rama Sreenivasan: the um face to face and being able to do things remotely um and virtually. But at the same time there was a level of complexity, because there were so many different platforms that there was a level of frustration
Rama Sreenivasan: as opposed to you being just another. One of those is that differentiator being able to do it through a simple link. And you're not asking people to download software because it was so frustrating for me and on the right on the call. It's like the question in the mind of my my viewers and listeners is my God! Why do we need another? And I think you've addressed it. But give me your comments on it.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, you know, I want to be
Rama Sreenivasan: uh what but differentiate between your use, which is a lot of face to face meetings, Um, you know. And you're probably on a computer, not on a phone for those meetings. Because,
Rama Sreenivasan: yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I want to. You know, if the expectation is not to you
Rama Sreenivasan: uh compete with those platforms like zoom webex and teams. They're they're they're really good for face to face internal meetings, just which is, you know which is even then you you'd seen the problems there, right? But we're where we're dabbling is with a customer call. They typically call on a smartphone, and they're not going to have those apps on the smartphone, even if they had them by chance. It's not going to be updated. They have to go to the app store updated, and they're only calling like you said
Rama Sreenivasan: very frustrated. So it's that, and it's also. We don't also. Not. We don't We can do face to face. But we're focused on looking at equipments, processes, damage. So it's all about eyes on a problem situation or a facility.
Rama Sreenivasan: Right? I love it. But that's the differentiation, is It's less about face to face, and it's more eyes on the problem.
Rama Sreenivasan: Exactly. There's your value proposition right there, as you as you try to simplify the pitched organizations as well, because we have ways of doing face to face. But eyes on the problem is, it's huge as we spend time trying to describe what that issue is.
Rama Sreenivasan: That's fascinating. What? Tell me also so that there's on the on the customer service side, right? There's an opportunity to be able to help them
Rama Sreenivasan: address the problem, Identify the problem faster, right? Address the problem and solve the problem faster. That's huge on both sides of the equation, right for the organization and for the the customer client. Whatever you want to call them right, talked about the other side of your business which is helping people who are traditionally working or dispatched remotely. And they're not always solving problems. Sometimes they're just
Rama Sreenivasan: doing an install or something else.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we did that. We We got a home inspection during Covid, and during that time they just had me walk around with my phone and look at things.
Rama Sreenivasan: Talk about. Talk about people in the field. Don't necessarily have to be in the field so
Rama Sreenivasan: right and we do that right. A lot of a lot of city inspector that use Blitz today, and county inspectors do a water. Heated inspection of smoke, alarm, inspection all these kinds of things right. And
Rama Sreenivasan: and so yes, there's the huge opportunity where, seeing that it we're, instead of driving out there in traffic, sitting in traffic, getting onto a place for a lot of use cases to have to do exactly what they did in person, but remotely
Rama Sreenivasan: Um. And so, and not only that, not only for inspections and audits, but also for installs like you said, Even if a technician went on site,
Rama Sreenivasan: there's also because of the shortage of labor. You know what age of subject matter experts. They're getting on the job training now. In Previously they would send two technicians, senior technician on a junior technician. Again. There
Rama Sreenivasan: you can have a centralized subject matter expert sitting somewhere in in one part of the country, but helping junior technicians getting unstuck and problems on site as well. So it's not just about,
Rama Sreenivasan: you know, doing it remotely. But in case you had to go there and you got stuck, you could get help through the technology as well, because you might actually have to send somebody. But you don't know you can triage it
Rama Sreenivasan: exactly.
Rama Sreenivasan: You got it. You got it, I mean, you know it exactly. That's uh. That's absolutely right. The first call is used to be a triage call with with saves a truck roll, and then it might even um be decided on that call that this could be done completely, remotely. They don't even have to go and send somebody in, and even if they send somebody in person now going in is armed with
Rama Sreenivasan: great tribal knowledge from experts around the world, in fact, to help him if he got unstuck to help if he got stuck
Rama Sreenivasan: right right and and and you can't, and you can't access talent around the world here's the thing because it's got to be a win-win right? We're seeing a lot of things from organizations where it works really well for them, but they're also transferring it to their customers, where it works really well to do self-check out, but not everybody wants to do self-check out here's what I love about this, and as I have ever wrote a word to empty Nestors, my wife and I I mean I've been. I've been
Rama Sreenivasan: business for a lot of years. My biggest challenge, especially because I travel pretty extensively, is It's not even just somebody coming to my home or my office. It's finding the freaking window
David Avrin: that aligns with what I can do and what they can do, because it is, it's dependent on a truck Roll isn't it the
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah. And so maybe they'll say, yeah, we've got time available on Thursday or Monday, and I said, i'm in Ireland on Thursday, Monday, but I've got time this afternoon. Well, we can't right
Rama Sreenivasan: right, and that's a world of talent and potentially right. It might ultimately need a truck role. But but in most cases it won't. That's what I love from an experience from a customer's perspective. I'm not worried about the window,
Rama Sreenivasan: which is that so convenient?
David Avrin: And a lot of people also
David Avrin: who work in offices of having to take that day off off of work, hoping somebody if they show up.
Rama Sreenivasan: And you said it, I mean. And Griffin said it better so well, because i'm i'm looking at from that perspective is, where's Where's the real differentiation? Tell me a little bit about about the technology. One of the things that you had said is not only can somebody as they open up the back of the camera, and you make sure everybody's got their pants on um, because that's about to happen right when they click it. But tell me what they can do. We talk about circling in. Can they? Zoom? Yeah, Tell me the different things to be Yeah, absolutely so. And these
Rama Sreenivasan: very depending on the use case, we have different features turned out for different kinds of work that need to be done. But yes, you can. You can point at specific things. All participants can point so collaboratively pointing. Is it? What about this? What about this? And so they can point? They can zoom in remotely. Again.
Rama Sreenivasan: Customer experience. We make it as easy for the customer to just hold the phone. They shouldn't have to figure out. Hey, What features do I need to use? We just all they have to do is use the phone with all the phone steady and the agent can point. The agent can take photographs remotely using the camera of the customer's. Phone. Um! You can record parts of that interaction just like audio calls are recorded. You can record calls with the customer's permission when they sign a privacy policy. That's what
Rama Sreenivasan: gets in, and you know, sure, clears all that makes everything is good. So you can record parts of the call for training purposes. For proof of work done. You can add other participants on the flight. So imagine there's another, a contact Center agent looking at something, and the Contact Center also knows there's actually a technician who's dispatched to the next next town.
Rama Sreenivasan: I can patch him in
Rama Sreenivasan: again without an app download, and they can. I can look at that problem with the technician and say, Oh, it just flip that switch. Hold it down to three seconds. You're good to go.
Rama Sreenivasan: That's huge. As opposed to scheduling another call. Right? So you add people on the flight. Um! You can take notes you can again. You can pull in with past data. This is where the Ai piece comes in right with past data.
Rama Sreenivasan: The last time the same problem happened was six months ago with another technician or another contact Center agent. What did that person do? The result of problem? If this Contact Center agent knew that
Rama Sreenivasan: I had access to that data with the recommendation engine that would be so powerful. And that's why the Ai pieces with past data. So
Rama Sreenivasan: wow, Um, yeah. And this And and is that that data that that big data? How many times have we experienced the same problem? Who has access to that? The person that you're that that you're having to call with? Is it available to the the person? How does that come up?
Rama Sreenivasan: Yes, so you usually it's. Ah, the the the data set is with Ah, the Contact Center all the features of the same way. They are the ones who maintain You've got. Ah, their crms or your field service management systems maintaining notes. And so we'd have to tap into those notes and build the data set for the entering the Ai engine to suggest recommendations for a new problem based on fast resolution steps
Rama Sreenivasan: right so along that line, because it sort of makes me think about like, where could this go? Is that ultimately, if there's something that because every um technical support, customer service person will not have encountered every problem
Rama Sreenivasan: right? Yeah, you may not be technically trained, but there is sort of Here's the standard right. It's ultimately lead to
David Avrin: the company creating a a series of short training videos based on a particular problem, right? Because nowadays we go to Youtube, and we can watch exactly how to install this seat. Cover in my G
Rama Sreenivasan: right right? Step by step through that, because it's exactly that kind of thing. Does it describe an opportunity to create short training videos? Not necessarily for the support person, but for the end users having the problem
Rama Sreenivasan: absolutely. And then, you know, there's you can take it at different levels of sophistication. One is, you know, having a training video on demand that pulls up. Hey, give this to your customer, and they'll be good to go, and they'll walk them through step by step,
Rama Sreenivasan: step by step.
Rama Sreenivasan: But you can even take it up a notch right. You can even take it up up. You can even say, imagine when you search on Youtube. I mean, you don't know which part of the video to go to right. But imagine, if you could say, Go to
Rama Sreenivasan: you, go to the forty second second,
Rama Sreenivasan: this video, and that's what your solution is. You can get to that level of sophistication if you have the data sets for it right, so you can get very specific and save a lot of time because the solution is not just having a big data set that you have to spend hours coming through
Rama Sreenivasan: quickly. Pinpoint what you need very quickly. And so it's It's about external Yeah. So talk to me. About what problems organizations are facing
Rama Sreenivasan: that would help them self-identify, saying, I need something like this, because when I speak on customer experience, I was in right before the pandemic I was to bog it to Columbia, speaking of a customer experience conference, and they define Cx differently for them. Customer experience just means call centers right, and of course there's a danger in saying, How fast can we get them off the phone to get on to the next thing?
David Avrin: And so even their trade show was just headsets and cubicles or things like that. So
David Avrin: for companies who have call centers or technicians who they do a truck dispatch out in the field
Rama Sreenivasan: you go.
Rama Sreenivasan: What would you say from a sales perspective? If you're experiencing A, B and C right, we need to talk
Rama Sreenivasan: right. Find what that A, B and C is for me.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yes, the first one would be a tremendous amount of truck rolls. Unnecessary truck rolls. Right. Repeat truck roll. Sometimes you'll see
Rama Sreenivasan: not just one truck outside an apartment building for a telco problem. You might see three of those same trucks calling one after the other. So three trucks that's you know. Typically A truckload is between one hundred to two hundred dollars,
Rama Sreenivasan: you know, and three trucks with subject matter experts driving to the same place. That's crazy, expensive, right so. And who else is being delayed because trucks are not available
Rama Sreenivasan: Right? Right? What frustration is is escalating because of that?
Rama Sreenivasan: Exactly so. Truck rolls is a big one that one of our customers come to me. I want to reduce, because, you know, the Contact Center might be. Say, i'm just going to dispatch another technician. I'm just going to pass the buck on really quick. It's a small problem. I don't care. I get my average channel time down, and so i'm done in three seconds. But guess what a truck is going out to fix a problem that I could have fixed if i'd seen it on on on on video, right? So so they had. They usually come together and say, Oh,
Rama Sreenivasan: a minute we're we're we're we're sending them so many trucks. But a lot of these could have been avoided.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, right? So so that's uh. So one thing is definitely truck rolls and there are different forms like I said, repeated. Repeat truck rolls they call they go, go in, come back, go back in again, because the first and they didn't fix it right. So they they take the wrong parts, for example, and at that point the customer is also at risk,
Rama Sreenivasan: and that's That's my second thing. Yeah, there's Csat scores, and the Nbsp for stuff starts going here. They're known for really bad customer experience,
Rama Sreenivasan: revealing myself all over again on a contact center. Right you! How many times we've done that right, and then call it, and then they come in. They say they don't have the right thought. They go out. I can't deal with this vendor anymore.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yes, are they looking at those metrics? How are we losing? And why are we? Why are we losing those? Because that's that's quantifiable.
Rama Sreenivasan: Absolutely Turn and retention is one of those, and that's why it's It's kind of connected to their Cs and and D scores. Usually you should be able to correlate
Rama Sreenivasan: your return, or for retention with your dropping csat and nts scores. Right? So it's that's a big one, and then the other thing is labor. Shortage is another one where they don't have enough techs, a lot of actors and a lot of turnover in the Contact center in the field tech department. So they, realizing. Oh, my God, we're everybody's retiring, or this job does this so much turn over, So we need to make it more efficient.
Rama Sreenivasan: One guy centralizes without having to go everywhere. That's another thing. So this is. These are the four items that I mentioned right drug role, and I think one of the bigger drivers. Also we're saying today is is wait times, as people are prioritizing speed, not just speed of answers in spite of somebody picking up the phone. But if somebody says we can absolutely do it. But we can't get somebody out there till next week,
David Avrin: right, and we're like we. We are people sitting on their thumbs right now, because we're down, and we're expressing downtime there. There almost is no investment that is worth it to eliminate that kind of a thing to be able to do that.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, let me ask you one last question in the in the time that we've got all that i'm really curious about this is that at entrepreneurs that we talk to sometimes they've got a really clear vision, a lot of excitement, right? We think we've created a cure for cancer that tastes like chocolate, right? And we roll out this new product.
David Avrin: What was your biggest learning? Um, Not in terms of funding or things like that, but in terms of maybe features that it did not include as you went and rolled out over the last four four years or so that year one or your two are realized. We've added, like ten new features that I had really thought about. But our marketplace spoke very loudly to us. What what might some of those enhancements over your initial vision. What might those have been?
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, that's a good one. You know that we've, you know we started with
Rama Sreenivasan: always big fans of simplicity, right? So we've always gone with the very, very bare minimum which made an impact That's why the app free approach. Just have the camera, don't it, turn off most things and start with something very basic that the agent and the customer can use on a consistent basis, right? And then um. So I I At this point I mean, what have you heard from your customers that said, I love this?
Rama Sreenivasan: Can you also make it do blank
Rama Sreenivasan: right, right? And they would ask for like your blue companies would ask for translation. Yeah, I love this. When I add a Japanese.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, I want what I say, to be translated and Japanese, so that they can understand not only translated, but also they hear it in Japanese. So it's coming together a lot of smart minds,
Rama Sreenivasan: but each, like the Un General Assembly, where everybody hears it in the language they they're good at right, So that's something very cool that they've asked for, and we're working on that right now.
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah, I would have assumed that there's new things like that all the time. Yeah,
David Avrin: Ramas Srinivasan want to get the name right. If people want to learn more about Blitz, how do they? How do they contact you?
Rama Sreenivasan: Yeah. So our website is Bl: I T. Z. That's two Z's don Ceo. And so we've got enough information on our website, and you should be able to just contact us through through the website.
David Avrin: Yeah, awesome. I I think this is. This is so needed. I'm part of me, and I geek out on this this stuff all the time. Nobody's buying technology for the sake of technology. But if it really solves a problem, and what I love about this is is, it might be sort of a problem. They didn't realize they had because there was not
Rama Sreenivasan: an alternative or a solution. You can have everybody finding different, every customer servicing. What do you have on your phone that's trying to see if we can. That causes additional time as well. So i'm excited to see where this goes. I think we should. We should stay in in touch. I'm stick around on the other side, and we'll say bye, so hang type for a second. Remind everybody you pick up a copy of my new book
David Avrin: addition to the ones that are strategically located here. Next to my head, If you're watching the video version, the new book is the morning huddle,
David Avrin: powerful customer experience conversations to wake you up and shake you up and win more business. In fact, all of my books are available on Amazon, some of them in multiple languages like yours as well as you were talking. Um! Be sure to click to like this podcast subscribe, and you will get a notification of new episodes. Leave your comments below. Click the little bell, icon, to receive notifications as they come through. You can learn more about my keynote. Speaking of my consulting at David Avril and Com. Matter of fact, I got a random preview video.
David Avrin: It shows me speaking around the world. Check that out at David Avril. Dot com Thanks for tuning in to the customer experience of managed podcasts. Remember, leave a comments big thanks to my guest, Rama Srinivasan, and be good. Thanks.