The industry needs CCaaS to shift to a true CX platform where all a customer’s data is available and used to interact with them. Only then will brands understand the entire customer journey and be able to provide personal and differentiated services.
Last week, Zingly.ai emerged from stealth mode with its “Collaborative Customer Experience” (CCX) platform to rethink how businesses deal with customers.
Industry veterans from Avaya, Five9, Glia, and Talkdesk are leading Zingly, whose platform merges generative AI (gen AI), digital interactions, and telephony. The platform is designed for businesses that want to offer personalized services to their customers, which should be almost all companies.
Zingly’s Team
Zingly was founded in 2021 with the goal of addressing the inefficiencies of traditional contact centers, which are costly and difficult to scale given the common shortage of agents. Contact centers often rely on 800 numbers and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which need to be updated and more convenient for customers.
The company’s founder, Gaurav Passi, is a former executive at Avaya and Five9, Other key executives include:
- John D’Amour (formerly of Five9 and Amdocs), co-founder and Head of Products
- Piotrek Chojnowski (Five9 and Amdocs), co-founder and Head of CX and Design
- Jafar Adibi (Talkdesk), Head of AI & Engineering
- Pat Oldenburg (Five9), Chief Marketing Officer
- Gary Chan (Gila), Chief Revenue Officer
- Brian Schnack (Five9), Head of Customer Success
Introducing Zingly’s AI Buddy & Rooms
With CCX, Zingly puts the power of AI and a simple, 24/7, persistent experience in the hands of the end customers, bringing collaboration to CX with a transparent, frictionless experience for both customers and their brands. Zingly’s CCX platform comprises three key products: Zingly Buddy, Relationship-AI, and Rooms.
Zingly AI Buddy
At a macro level, Zingly helps businesses manage relationships while empowering customers. With traditional CCaaS offerings, the data is only visible to the brand, but Zingly exposes it to both. Built on generative AI (Gen AI), the Zingly AI Buddy engages customers in a persistent Room. In this permanent virtual space, customers can interact with a business anytime, on an ongoing basis. Zingly Rooms combines customers, Gen AI, and agents in one place for a simple, seamless, always-on experience. Zingly’s Relationship AI layer automates customer experience management, seamlessly connecting customers, employees, and AI to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce risks.
By integrating all communication mediums – voice, video, chat, messaging, calendaring, screen-sharing, documents, e-sign, multimedia, and payments – into a single platform, Zingly provides a unified experience for customers and brands. This allows end-customers to keep the entire context of their needs and their full relationship journey with their businesses in one place, avoiding the hassle of switching between different communication channels. This approach offers a smoother, more flexible experience while enabling companies to meet customers where they are, using their preferred communication method at any time.
Zingly Rooms
Unlike chatbots, Zingly Rooms maintains all customer interactions within the personal, persistent “room” visible to customers and agents. This ensures continuous, transparent, and asynchronous communication across multiple channels, allowing users to pick up where they left off with full context and without repeating information numerous times. Customers can rate each interaction, adding another layer of personalization. For businesses, this streamlines customer service and provides valuable data on customer satisfaction.
With Rooms as the building blocks of relationships, businesses can observe and manage all aspects of the customer journey. The platform’s no-code/low-code design integrates into any tech stack, combining Gen AI, human input, and data. Examples of the business impacts of putting the customer experience directly in the hands of end-users with Zingly include a 30% increase in lead-to-customer conversion rates, 3x faster time to revenue, and 5x customer engagements with the same agent headcount, according to the company.
Zingly’s Market Focus
Zingly, which has raised $10 mil. in seed funding from investors like Dell Technologies Capital, focuses on high-value sectors such as financial services, healthcare and education. The platform integrates with CRM systems, CCaaS, and customer support tools, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. And, integrating with existing technology stacks minimizes deployment disruptions.
Zingly is expanding its data science, engineering, sales, and marketing teams, with plans to double its workforce by the end of next year. The company aims to support millions of interactions in 2024.
Addressing the Fear of Contacting Customer Service
I met with Passi when Zingly was in the concept phase. He was late to a golf tournament where he was playing in my group – he told me he had an appliance issue at home and got frustrated dealing with the call center, which didn’t seem to have the necessary information to help him quickly solve his problem. Believing that others share such frustrating experiences that often go unresolved, Passi came up with the term “FORO” or Fear Of Reaching Out – which became the issue Zingly is meant to address.
Most of us dread calling an airline, bank, mobile operator, or cable company. The only time I don’t mind reaching out to a brand is when I have a personal relationship with the company. As an example, when I call/text the service department of my local Porsche dealer, the person there knows me, my car and has a good idea of the history and can get very personal in what they recommend. If he isn’t there, I’ll call back a different day because of FORO. The question is, how can every brand achieve the same level of personalization as this? That is what Zingly is attempting to do by changing the way brands interact with customers and vice versa.
One of Zingly’s customers, Ahmad Elsawaf, Head of Digital Strategy at Transamerica Bank, told me he was drawn to the Zingly vision by its complete rethink of customer experience. Much of the industry focuses on average handle time (AHT), first-call resolution, and other legacy contact center metrics. Elsawaf told me, “Most contact vendors are great at optimizing the mundane, where I take a poor to mediocre transaction and make it a bit shorter. Zingly was the first vendor that worked with me to help me re-think how we should be dealing with customers.”
Zingly’s approach aligns with my thinking about the CCaaS industry, which I believe – at least the way we think about it – is dying. Existing CCaaS products focus on serving the needs of traditional agents that handle the same old type of calls. In other words, optimizing the mundane.
