Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / How XEBO.ai Handles 20x More Complaints With AI
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Hello everybody. Today we're chatting with Anand Nigam who is the co-founder and director of XEBO AI Anand, it's so great to have you here. Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker. Anand: Thank you, Gina, and thank you for inviting me to your podcast. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. I always like to start with the basics Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Anand: ⁓ So Gina, I've been in ⁓ insights and experience space for more than 25 years now ⁓ and an amazing journey. ⁓ worked on agency side as a consultant, I worked on client side as an implementer of insights and CX initiatives. And then I founded a company which was into insights business called 4SiGHT. Then I co founded another company called 4SiGHT CX. ⁓ And I saw an opportunity because the world was moving digital while we were doing consultancy, you know, long time 15, 20 years back, where we used to do everything manually. And I saw these smart devices, smartphones picking up and consumers they are becoming connected digitally and all. So I saw an opportunity I said why not you know have a digital platform can be used to collect customer feedback and where the journey for XEBO started and I co-founded XEBO with a colleague of mine, Yash Sultania. comes with computer science background and I come from the business side ⁓ things ⁓ having in insights business for 25 years. Yeah, that's in short about my background and how you we thought about XEBO. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Now tell us one thing about yourself that we're not gonna find on LinkedIn. Anand: What you will not find of I travel a lot. ⁓ I've almost traveled about 50 odd countries. So the business has taken me across the globe. In US, I was just telling Jonathan, I've already done 28 states and hopefully I'll be closing this year with about 35 states by end of this year. So, yeah, I love traveling. I've got a lot of air mile points with me. I've got a lot of Gina Gibson: Yeah. Anand: hotel stay points, I keep getting upgraded and all. So yeah, that's in brief something which is not there on my LinkedIn. Gina Gibson: Ha ha ha. Love it. So now is the point in time where we typically ask our guests to give us your elevator pitch. So why don't you tell everybody you kind of alluded to it about the customer experience and the voice of the customer. Why don't you give us your elevator pitch for XEBO Anand: I'm assuming that the elevator is in say 150 floors building. are going from ground zero to one 50th floor. So I've got enough time to give that elevator pitch. Gina Gibson: Okay. We'll go with the tower. Anand: So yeah, XEBO.ai is a native experience platform, which is focused on customer employee experience, and even helping clients with customer insights. ⁓ In simple we help organizations ⁓ listen to customers better, understand their customers, what they are in real time, ⁓ and most importantly, actions that improve experiences that the product. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Anand: So that's what the entire platform has been built from data to insights to action. Gina Gibson: That was a very short elevator ride, but that was great. ⁓ Anand: In fact, if ⁓ the elevator keeps going on, then there's so much to be added to it. There are so many exciting things about XEBO that we are very proud of it. We have been competing and winning against some of the biggest global names in VOC space. I'm sure you all would have heard of those names like Qualtrics and Medallia. And for us winning against them, the journey entire makes it very special. And I'm not sure if you have heard about it that we are also part of Gartner. Gina Gibson: Feel free. Anand: Magic Quadrant. was recognized for the first time in 2025. And in 2026, we have made significant improvement in our presence on the Magic Quadrant. Gartner has called us AI native platform. And we take a lot of pride in building those AI features in the platform because other than the origin of the platform, which was all about creating something which is secure. which is meeting all the data sovereignty requirements of especially clients which are from say government sector or clients, banking clients, insurance clients where data security ISR is very important. We focused a lot on making the platform very simple. You know, ⁓ I'm sure you have walked across, you know, these ⁓ CX departments and the biggest challenge they face is that when they are subscribing to these platform is the complexity that they need to work with and to manage those complexity, they are investing in the platform. But in addition to the platform, they need to hire consultants. They need to hire tech experts who will actually do everything for them in the platform. And I think That's not ⁓ right. We felt that we need to address that challenge. And that's why we created our platform with this lens on how we can make complex things very simple in our platform. And that's what we are proud to do. Gina Gibson: Let me ask you a question. So I'm I'm glad you brought up the AI side of it. So you initially said, you know, the vision started from a digital platform, and then of course AI has come in as as we all know it is everything, right? Talk to me about the is it the recommendations or the actions. Is that AI driven or how does that work within your platform? Anand: ⁓ Absolutely. See, I'll give you some examples like how we have actually... done those customizations within platforms so that it works with clients ecosystem and clients way of doing things. Traditionally, if for example, you are in Complaints Management Department, have got a team who is looking at customer complaints which are coming in through multiple channels, be it emails, ⁓ it chat, be it call center. So there's huge volume of complaints which is coming in. ⁓ then the clients, ⁓ or agents they are responding to these complaints and they have got a standard manual that they can refer to to respond to those complaints and all. What we did was we looked at clients historical data on what has been different types of complaint and what has been the clients response. In simple terms we took all that information, it to the AI. Now what AI does is AI understands how the client responds to any specific complaint by looking at the history. And today, it's able to respond to the client real time as soon as the complaint comes in. Now, for the client, it was a valve thing because he was struggling. He had 12, for example, a small client who had only 12 agents who were looking into customer complaints and responding to the clients. Once the client grows, the volume of complaints which are coming or volume of inquiries which are coming is humongous and they cannot keep on increasing the staff from 12 to 24 to 100 and so on. So how they can use the new age technology and AI actually came to that rescue and today those 12 people are handling 20 times volume that they used to handle earlier. Gina Gibson: Wow. That's Anand: So that's an example on how AI is able to change, not just giving insights, not just telling, okay, this is overview of what the complaints are known, but responding to the customers. Even going to specific stakeholders on identifying the key changes that they need to do to remove the friction in customer journeys. Gina Gibson: That's that's impressive. And and you mentioned some of the bigger players in the market earlier. What ⁓ what are your differentiators? How why are you beating? Anand: So there are two big differentiators. One I would say, which is what I told you earlier, simplifying the entire process. Our platform can be used by the stakeholders on their own. It's very simple. Even whether you want to create a survey, you just need to... Gina Gibson: Mm. Anand: type in your requirement and the platform will create the survey that you require. Best in class survey, it's been trained to do that. If you're working with huge volume of information, you don't have to depend on any consultant or a technical expert to come and give you, okay, what's, you know, big picture. The platform itself, it analyze all that unstructured data and make it very simple, very actionable for you. So simplicity is one key driver and how we beat ⁓ or do well against competition and the second one is the price. We have been ⁓ very ⁓ cost efficient and we pass on those benefits to the clients. So our competitors are pretty expensive. you are spending million dollar on just a platform, CX departments, they require resources, they require so many initiatives, they will not be able to invest in that. So our platform allows that. It only takes away very small portion of your CX budget for automating lot of these customer listening, customer insights so that you can focus on Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Anand: initiatives which will drive customer experience or improvements. Gina Gibson: I love that. And I'm guessing with it being like simplicity has to drive adoption, right? Like increases adoption because if it's easy to use, I'm gonna keep using it, right? Whereas if it's complex, it's probably gonna become shelfware at some point. Anand: Absolutely, you are absolutely right. ⁓ If you can't make your platform simple to use, think over a period of time you will realize that you have been building so many features in the platform, but at the end of the day your clients are using only 10 % of what you have created. If you simplify those features, make it very easy and make it very cost effective for the client, then they will start using the entire ecosystem. They're not using only 10 % of the ecosystem that you have created. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Yeah. Are there any emerging trends that you're seeing in in voice of the customer or in, you know, CX, EX or, you know, experience management that you're particularly excited about or that you guys are preparing for or anything like that? Anand: Absolutely. Most of these platforms, VOC platforms, and I feel that if we continue to only focus on survey and collecting feedback through surveys, we are not going to survive in the long term. So the platforms need to evolve. And the biggest evolution that I am seeing is the platforms, they are moving beyond surveys. Today, customers are giving feedback over social media. ⁓ You can actually monitor customers, their behavior in your CRMs. You are also monitoring customer, what feedback, the experiences that they are talking about in the call center, call center. So there are multiple ⁓ touch points where the customer is interacting with the company or the brand. The platform needs to have that ability to capture that. customer experience, customer feedback across multiple channels go beyond surveys. So that's one aspect. So omni-channel usage of getting the customer information. And the second part is it's not just collecting data or providing insights, but going beyond collecting data and providing insights, you should make the information actionable. you should be in a position where the platform is able to help clients to respond to the customers appropriately. Escalate initiatives which are recurring in their customer journeys, the friction points which are recurring to stakeholders within the organization to do something about it. And not just leave it at that, give some recommendation on what they can do to improve or reduce the function. Gina Gibson: And so I'm gonna go back to your first point on on ⁓ going past the survey. So are you talking about kind of like mining the data that that sits everywhere as far as like listening to the intent on the call and the customer's intent and that kind of thing? Is that what you're meaning by let's go beyond the survey and take advantage of what we have? Anand: So yeah, so going beyond the surveys listening to the customers, their activities, CRM, so mining all that information and present. ⁓ the second topic that you touched upon is ability to predict. ⁓ So ability to predict on how the customer is likely to behave. So that also gives an opportunity. For example, if I'm able to predict that this customer is likely to churn based on ⁓ ⁓ signals that I got which could be beyond survey. So survey is one of the signal where he talked about his poor experience but it also got reflected in his usage behavior where for example he started he used to have a frequency of usage say seven times in a day. Gina Gibson: Yeah, yeah. Anand: which is reduced to seven times in a week. Again, that's also a signal that there is a declining usage. So ability to predict a churn could also be something which can be a huge value addition. And we have got all the data in the platform to do that. We can use the survey data, we have got their behavior data, and if we can use to predict these behavior, it can be an added advantage. Gina Gibson: Love it. Wonderful. Who is your ideal customer? Anand: Ideal customer is anyone who is working in the customer experience department. So head of customer experience are typically our main stakeholders, I would say. ⁓ And we do work with other... stakeholders within an organization which could include the IT department because our system needs to be integrated with CRM or the ecosystem. We also come across information security team because when the system is being integrated with the CRM internally, they want to make sure that the platform has got all the compliances, the ISO certification, information security, data privacy, ⁓ Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Anand: data protection, all those things implemented. So we do interact with them. But if those interactions with the data security or IT team is just once in the lifetime of the platform, the CX team actually uses our platform day in, day out. They see the results every day. So they become our key stakeholders. Gina Gibson: Right. Excellent. And there's no real vertical, like you cross every vertical, right? You're in healthcare, you're in finance, you're in real estate, you're in everything. Anand: Absolutely. So we are working in banking, telecom, insurance, real estate, ⁓ retail, hospitality, healthcare, ⁓ public services, utility companies, automotive, transportation, you name it. Gina Gibson: That's great. next for XEBO? Anand: Next for XEBO mean, with the way things are changing that ⁓ been challenging when we conceptualize XEBO, it was created as a digital platform. ⁓ with focus on having safety and security ⁓ as the key. Then ⁓ we said that the platform needs to be simple. Initially when we thought about ⁓ our vision about simplicity was the UI UX part. It should be simple, easy for customers to see information, interact with the platform and all. But with the changing times with the AI, ⁓ the growth of AI artificial intelligence and all. What we have done is we have now moved away from just looking at simplicity from UIUS perspective, but also usage perspective, and just continue the journey. As the technology evolves, as the things change, our vision is to keep the platform ⁓ not just scalable and secure. Gina Gibson: Mm. Yeah. Anand: But from a long-term sustainability perspective, with the changes which are taking place, it should also be very sustainable. mean, the platform is relevant today, but we need to make sure that it's relevant 10 years later as well. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Yeah. Is there anything that you would like the audience to know that I haven't asked you yet? Anand: I mean, there are so many things... Gina Gibson: Yeah. Anand: Oh yeah. There are a lot of stories that we have got. In fact, one of the biggest story that we are very proud of is the partnerships that we have developed with the client. Many times you will come across the platforms which when you are using, you are expected to customize your ecosystem for the platform. But what we have seen is that if we work closely with the clients and make sure that our platform is customized to their ecosystem and their way of working, the partnership or the relationship with those clients grows. And ⁓ we, I mean, one of the proud, there are so many stories that I can talk about, which are proud moments for us with the clients, but one of the proudest moment for us is one of the global airlines. ⁓ They wanted to replace their existing ⁓ VOC solution and and we were pitching for it and this is something four years back. We pitched for it and they had very specific requirement and the reason why they were replacing that previous ecosystem was The previous ecosystem was unable to customize a lot of their requirements because they had got a very specific way of running the entire CX program. And ⁓ they challenged us saying that, you develop these features which are customized just for us? And the pitch was like we were given only 15 days to make the pitch. and my team came up and developed those features for the clients in 15 days. We did a demo and the demo was like, you know, it was full day demo, three sessions planned, different team members. You have got the CX stakeholders, you have got the IT and security and you have got the sales team, have got the HR team, the entire ecosystem of stakeholders which can be there in client premise was there. And Gina, you won't believe I had goosebumps when my team was presenting all those features. And that was the journey. I felt so confident after that presentation that no matter what, I think we are winning it. And we got the good news. We won it. And in the last three years, we have converted that win into an amazing partnership. Today, our platform has developed so many customized features for that client, integrating it with their ecosystem and becoming a part of it. Gina Gibson: So clear. Anand: Now that's something which is very unique and usually you don't get to hear how the partnerships are created and it's not just platform. We are of course a platform company but we spent a lot of time in creating partnerships than just the platform. Gina Gibson: I love to hear that and it's it's really encouraging because when you were saying, you know, the others were putting their product and asking the customer to adopt around it, it's wonderful and it's something that we always look for at Think Forward is to go for vendors, especially for those customers that don't fit the box, right? That that have those rare requirements and that's more common than not. ⁓ it's wonderful to find partners like you that are agile enough to work with you know, their requirements and become part of their team versus having them become part of the product, right? And and so that's that's super encouraging to hear. Thanks for sharing that. Anand: Yeah, absolutely. mean, there are platforms which are do-it-yourself and that option is also there in the platform. But if you want to develop long term partnership and relationships, you will have to go that extra mile and we did that. Gina Gibson: Okay. Absolutely. Absolutely. So to wrap things up and on, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do some rapid fire. So what sound or noise do you love? Anand: Okay. I love water. So water in any form. If there is ⁓ a river flowing by, I love it. ⁓ If there is a fountain and the water is falling, I love it. So yeah, sound of water is something that I love. Gina Gibson: Perfect. Wonderful. I thought you were gonna say airplane jet, but or the jet engines. ⁓ what sound or noise do you hate? Anand: airplane. Gina Gibson: What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Anand: ⁓ if I am not doing what I do which is insights and CX I would most likely be an adventurer you know running some camps and treks. Yeah, so I would love to do that. Gina Gibson: Wonderful. And Anand if somebody wants more information about XEBO who should they reach out to? Anand: They can reach out to me anytime. I'm always available and yeah, just go to info @ XEBO.ai or Anand @ XEBO.ai. Gina Gibson: Wonderful. And thank you so much for joining us and ⁓ ha bringing your story and the success stories ⁓ to us. The partnership is wonderful and I look forward to hearing so much more. Thank you. Anand: Thank you, Gina, and thank you for this opportunity and especially pleasure talking to you.