Shaping Exceptional Customer Experiences With Generative AI | Ashu Dubey

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #237 we were live at Customer Contact Week in the Caesar's Forum Entertainment Center in Las Vegas last month with Ashu Dubey, CEO at Gleen AI based in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. 

Ashu and his team are building Gleen AI - The most accurate and capable generative AI platform for customer support and success! Generative AI has ushered in a new-era for customer support and they help businesses scale their customer support at a fraction of the cost using Gleen AI

In this episode, Ashu and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #237 Highlight Reel:**

1. How Generative AI/ML is changing the customer landscape rapidly
2. Equipping your customer facing team with "agent-assist" solutions
3. What we can all learn about AI from Meta, Amazon, Google & others
4. Educating customers & employees on where AI will lead us
5. Leveraging AI to expedite the growth of your business

Click here to learn more about Ashu Dubey

Click here to learn more about Gleen AI

Huge thanks to Ashu for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

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Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast #237 with Ashu Dubey, CEO at Gleen AI

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - All right guys, thanks so much for listening to another one of our live from CCW mini CXCP episodes I'm super excited for today. We have Ashu Dubey joining us Ashu is the CEO at Gleen, one of the super cool companies that has been out on the floor the last couple days Meeting and listening and learning to all the awesome folks that are been here at CCW Ashu, say hello to the CX nation, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:28) - Thank you so much Adrian for having me. Hey everyone I'm Ashu Dubey, co-founder and CEO of Gleen AI. We are a team based out of San Francisco AI company Very excited to be here. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:39) - We're pumped to have you brother I mean so guys Ashu and I met the other day when we were just walking around meeting with different vendors meeting with some of the providers Guys, there's a ton of incredible technology. There's a ton of incredible things to learn This is what Ashu and I were just talking about It's like there's just so much stuff here that even if you think you already know our space and you think you know this industry It's changing. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:59) - Yeah, it's just like changing quickly. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:01) - It's changing fast. So Ashu and his team at Gleen. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:03) - And you have got a good eye I must say that. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:06) - I try man, I try. But when Ashu and I met I said you got to come in You got to talk about Gleen His company's building something super duper cool And I just to set the stage before you jump into the Gleen story Ashu like We were just joking the number one thing that most people are here at Customer Contact to be talking about this week It's generative AI. It's understanding how machine learning and AI is disrupting and changing and Optimizing for all of us. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:30) - Yeah, and Ashu's team at Gleen is doing some incredible things Let me pass the microphone to you. Spend a couple minutes just talking about how'd you guys start Gleen? Yeah, how'd you build the initial team? And what are some of the things you guys are doing with your customers today? 

Speaker 2 (00:01:42) - Awesome. Yeah, so Gleen started around two years ago When I was a leading product growth top of the funnel at LinkedIn and my co-founder was leading business messenger group at Facebook awesome Meta now and We saw AI coming. We knew customer support sucks. Yeah, pardon my French. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:02) - No, it's okay and Then it's before chat GPT came to the scene This is May 2022 Chat GPT comes in November and we realized we are on the cusp of a new revolution in in CX This can change things and then we jumped in and we started Creating products doing early demos with the customers and they loved it now Fast forward two years later Most of the AI that you see at CCW right now is AI Which is agent facing, okay, so it's an AI helping the agents be better more efficient. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:37) - We are user facing AI Okay, so we directly help users Get their queries resolved get do things for them, which means we are bar for accuracy and relevance is way higher Yeah, so that's what we do in a nutshell. We collect knowledge from all your knowledge sources tools and We not just answer you just questions, but we also do things for them For example, you just are saying change my order Cancel my plan. We are AI does all of that. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:06) - I love it so like this is a big thing that I think there are and I want you to explain this a shoe but like This is almost like one of the big confusing points is people think about AI and they think about how is AI gonna help me? How's it gonna help my team? 

Speaker 1 (00:03:17) - It's not John I think what I've heard a lot of the conversations tell me if you've heard otherwise you've been out on that floor You've been out in the battle What I've heard is like people thinking that it's going to help their agents maybe with Being able to quickly search customer information be able to quickly find potential resolution paths Being able to quickly quickly search or filter things that otherwise they would have been doing manually But what you're saying is what you and that's what your team at gleen are doing. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:44) - It's taking a step further It's number one doing all of that doing the assessment for lack of a better term to simplify But then you're also being able to potentially fulfill or tee up And that's where this stuff gets. This is where it becomes a game-changer. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:58) - Absolutely. So you you got it. Absolutely, right? Most of the stuff is around helping agents and we think of it in terms of like crawl walk and run Yeah, and so we are with agent assist AI's we are in the crawl and walk phase Okay and where we are slightly ahead of the curve is the run phase and Many of our customers come to us for agent assist. Yeah, and they start using the user assist. Yeah yeah, that's a better word and What we also believe that a really I should be able to help you just directly Rather than be behind the agents I.

Speaker 2 (00:04:34) - Don't get me wrong. AI can elevate the output of agents. It does. We have that product, we love it. Our agents love it. Yeah, but there are times when you just just want that query thing resolved. They just want that order refunded. Yeah, you know that plan canceled and they don't want to, like, wait even for two minutes to talk to an agent- yeah, so why not make it available to them so that agents can focus on more nuanced tasks where AI cannot do? 

Speaker 1 (00:05:01) - Yeah, so that's our philosophy. I love it. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:03) - You know what it makes me think about you- and I was joking with you just a minute ago before we popped into this- but, like even us at CH Chronicles, guys, we work with all these different customers, so we work with all these incredible businesses, but what a shoe just said is one of the biggest opportunities they have in front of them, which is, hey, instead of, like you're a senior support manager or a director of support, taking time to bang out the next 10, 20, 50, 100 lower severity tickets or, frankly, lesser important tickets, things that could, frankly, our friends, like our friends that are building this type of AI technology, could easily take off our plate. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:39) - Guess who's got more time for your critical or your high severity tickets- exact things that like you're not just banging it out really quickly. There's investigation. You've got to do phone calls, maybe there's conversations internally before you can even get back to the resolution. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:52) - Exact some of the complex things. You're saving your people's time for that type of stuff, exactly so it improves the overall customer experience because customers, where they can get faster help, they get faster help through AI. Where they need more nuanced help, humans come in the loop and that's that's we believe the role of AI should be in the overall support space- love it. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:13) - Can you talk a little bit about the team that you built, a team at Gleen and, even if it's just kind of, what are some of the early roles or some of the early positions or some of the early focus areas? Building the technology and managing customers- you guys have that. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:24) - So we are primarily a bunch of product and engineers and researchers. Okay, are based out of San Francisco. So PhDs, as I said, my co-founder has been one of the best in units at Meta. We have other engineers, similar position like very, very smart people and similar backgrounds, like Amazon, McKinsey, and then we have customer support engineers. So we don't have customer support managers. Yeah, we have customer support engineers. Every customer who works with us gets a customer support engineer dedicated to them. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:55) - Okay, and ironically, customers buy us for AI support, but they love our human support more, yeah, yeah. Well, this stuff's complex, exactly. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:05) - Yeah, like any anything else in life, you need to have a partner- the solution, I hate to say the no offense to some of our incredible folks that are on the floor today, but, like the solutions, part of it- humans and teams and different organizations. Once you have the solution, you still need a partner or a strategic advocate that can help with the utility. How do you, how do you use the solution? 

Speaker 2 (00:07:25) - How do you absolutely implement the solution? 

Speaker 1 (00:07:27) - How do you test it right? Because every time what you put a powerful tooling lean in front of a new customer, they got to figure out, exactly. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:35) - Yeah, and, as you know, like many customers are like figuring out, like, where does a I fit into my overall contact center strategy? Yeah, I'm using these tools. Where do you put gleen into it? I want to use it. So there is a bit of a consultancy involved. Then there is a bit of implementation support involved and, of course, the ongoing support- like they need help. And also the other thing to notice: this stuff is changing. Yeah, what we are using today, one year from now in CCW, will be talking about different things for sure. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:07) - Right, and so our customers need the confidence that I'm with a partner that's evolving with the times and I'm not buying a technology that's stuck in time and five years down the line I have to buy another technology. Yeah, and so with us, they get the peace of mind with the engineer that's always with them in a strategic consulting approach, helping them understand the, the scene. Yeah, as it's evolving. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:31) - I love it for your ICP's today, for the, the primary customers and the primary types of businesses. The clean is targeted. What do they kind of look like? Just to give our listeners a sense, who are some of the companies or some of the people that you get the most excited when they've been walking by the booth today? 

Speaker 2 (00:08:47) - Yeah, these are like VPs of customer support, VP of customer experience, head of IT, because they're also involved in evaluating these solutions, and ideally, you have hundred or more support agents. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:02) - Okay, working, working. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:04) - on resolving customer support queries. We typically see between 50 to 70% of resolution rates by AI. Awesome. So that's pretty decent. 

Speaker 3 (00:09:14) - Fantastic. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:15) - Yeah, people love that. And that's a range, depending on how nuanced your business is. Yeah, yeah. But typically it's that. We are very strong in e-commerce. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:25) - Okay. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:26) - Where the volume is typically very high. We are making good inroads in FinTech and healthcare. Nice. They are slightly more regulated industry, so over there customers are a bit more suspect. They are still thinking about their AI strategies, which is where we help them think about how to think about this general space overall, and how to think about gleen. Sometimes it's a fit, sometimes it's not a fit, but that's where we stand in terms of ICP. I love it, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:52) - That's fantastic. So Ashu, before we wrap up, I want to ask two more questions about the industries, or about this event that we're at today. What is one or two of the biggest surprises that you and your team at Gleen are going to leave CCW that maybe you came here thinking you thought you were going to hear? I want to hear what are the one or two biggest surprises that you're leaving this conference from? 

Speaker 2 (00:10:13) - Yeah, so the bit surprising piece for me, we live in San Francisco, which is the hub of AI. There's a cradle of where AI begins. And before heading for CCW, I was thinking, okay, I'll have a lot of competition. Everyone talking about AI, and all the solutions will look similar, but it turns out we live in the future. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:36) - So when I come to CCW, most of the prospects are still thinking about agent-assist AI. Probably we are the only one, or maybe there may be one or two more companies which are directly user-facing AI. I'm sure next year that's going to be the talk of the town at CCW, is like, how can you directly assist users? But right now, no one is talking about it. So we are one of the only few. So I expected a lot more people in terms of competition. There is none, actually. So that's a pleasant surprise. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:05) - That's great. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:05) - Yeah, I think on the other side, where we'll have to, it's very clear that what we'll have to do a lot of work is to educate and help our customers and prospects move in this journey in San Francisco, where everyone is like techie and nerdy. It's very easy for them to see the value. They can sometimes ignore the risk as well. Over here, the risk is a big piece of how we talk about AI. Thankfully, we have anti-hallucinogen technology propriety that we have built, where the AI, we have two kinds of AI, two AIs built into one. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:40) - So one AI is the one that generates the answer, does things, and second is a supervisor AI that- QA, quality assurance. Exactly, that QA is the output of the first AI. And so that allows our customers a peace of mind. So educating more of our customers onto that, that the risks are there, but limited. And so working these customers, these big customers, giving them the confidence that, yes, AI can help you while you can minimize the risk as well is going to be some work. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:09) - I love that, man. I think it's going to be a lot of work for all of us. And I think, even for me, Ashu, leaving here, it's like, I knew I was going to hear a ton about, I knew what the loud and proud prize of the conference convention was going to be about. It's about people trying to become educated or further their education upon artificial intelligence, machine learning, all these things. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:29) - But I think one interesting takeaway for me too, is you still need smart people like us that can figure out how to leverage not just the technology and all the logic and the thinking that has gone into build this incredible technology, but how do you apply it to human experiences? And that's going to be, and I love what you just said a second ago, is like, I think we're going to keep talking about that piece even next year. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:52) - That's where people like you come in, your role becomes extremely, extremely critical because you communicate the value, you help the community move along in the journey. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:02) - I appreciate that, man. Thank you. Before I let you go, Ashu, where can people get in touch with you? Where can people go check out the incredible technology you guys are building at Gleen? And where can people get in touch with your team? 

Speaker 2 (00:13:13) - Awesome. So our website is gleen. ai, G-L-E-E-N, double E-N. There are other gleens as well. The spelling is important, G-L-E-E-N.ai. And you can find me on LinkedIn. Would love to connect and hear from all of you if anyone is interested or just wants to talk about AI. I'm happy to chat more. My name is Ashu Dubey. Just search for Ashu Dubey Gleen. I'm a top voice on LinkedIn, so you should be, hopefully LinkedIn's algorithm helps you find me easier. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:42) - That's awesome. Well, Ashu, thank you so much for joining us on the CX Chronicles podcast. It's been our absolute pleasure having you and best of luck to you and the team at Gleen.