The Company
Uniphore supports 1500 customers and clients at the world’s biggest enterprises, across major industries like telecom, banking and financial services, healthcare, retail, insurance and other verticals. Uniphore's leading Enterprise AI platform supports billions and billions of customer and employee engagements across 20 countries on a weekly basis.
At Uniphore, AI isn’t just a product but is at the core of the company’s operations and culture. A traditional support tool that used outdated workflows, therefore, wouldn’t cut it. We spoke to Abhiram Kramadhati, Director of Technical Support, and Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Customer Officer at Uniphore to understand how the company uses DevRev to deliver action-oriented customer support.
The Challenge
Building a culture of support
Right from the start, Abhiram and Vinod were certain that customer support at Uniphore wasn’t going to be about granular ticket metrics, but about building a larger customer-centric culture. Driven by two of the key cultural pillars of the organization, ‘One Big Team’ and 'Customer First', the company asked itself how support teams could become more deeply connected to product teams and be integral in delivering product improvement insights based on engagements with customers. Key to this change would be the tools customer support teams used each day to help solve customer issues.
“Support and operations are one of the few functions where a big part of the culture is driven by the platform and tooling decisions you make,” says Abhiram. “As complexity and scale of the business increase, complexity for people in the organization should not. The less time our support engineers spend on technical work, the more they can spend on taking care of our customers.”
Ticketing vs customer support
For the team at Uniphore, there was a clear difference between ticketing and support. As Vinod explains, a ticketing system’s only purpose is to measure how many tickets come in, how many get escalated, how many get resolved, etc.
Ticket management is merely a system of record but we want to implement a system of action. This encourages support teams to explore why a customer issue occurred and how it can be resolved so the problem never recurs. The best outcome a founder is looking for is for a support ticket to never enter in the first place.
Vinod MuthukrishnanFormer COO, Uniphore
As a B2B tech company, many incoming customer queries require engineering and product management teams to work together. However, the previous tool the company was using did not allow for this collaboration and had a transactional approach to customer support. Uniphore needed a support tool that would allow engineering and support teams to collaborate effortlessly and solve customer tickets. The team began to look for a solution that aligned with the support team’s culture of problem-solving.
The Solution
Migrating to a new way of work
When the team was first introduced to DevRev, it was clear that DevRev believed in the same values of customer support as Uniphore. “I’ve been in a lot of product conversations where the first thing you see is a demo,” says Abhiram. “But what really struck me with DevRev is that they delved deep into how a company works from support to backlog.”
Additionally, DevRev’s Airdrop feature that allowed Uniphore to effortlessly migrate data from their former customer support tool ticked a very important box. “The world of heavy enterprise where everything needs to be done by a system integrator is over,” says Vinod. “Tools that are easily deployed, used by my people, configured by my people and that I can democratize access to was the number one foundational requirement of any product that we evaluated.”
When Uniphore made the decision to move to DevRev, migration was a breeze. Using Airdrop, within just 6 hours, it was able to migrate:
- 16,000 tickets
- 72,000 comments
- 17,000 attachments
The Results
Building a single environment for support
DevRev custom-built an integration with Rocketlane and set up Pager Duty alerts and incident management workflows to enable the support team to live in a single environment. “With DevRev, we have a single source of truth,” explains Abhiram. “Any customer update on Rocketlane immediately reflects within DevRev. We know what level of customer we are dealing with and what the SLAs for each are.”
When we onboarded our team to DevRev, they realized that it offered a completely new way of working. They don’t need to use all these different tools to monitor and respond to customer tickets. They can live solely within the DevRev environment.
Abhiram Kramadhati Director - AI GTM & Ops, Cisco
One of the major goals Uniphore had for their support function was to identify issues before the customer so they never had to reach out in the first place. The team invested in monitoring tools to raise alerts. DevRev worked with Uniphore to ensure that alerts from these tools come in as issues or tickets within the DevRev platform. Even downstream, with the Jira bidirectional sync, support can create an issue within DevRev and it automatically gets updated on Jira. This made work quicker, more predictable, and consistent for the support team.
Making support an ally to product
The integrations between DevRev and other telemetry and development tools that Uniphore was using have helped support engineers to dive deep into customer issues.
There is a steel thread between how a customer requirement gets captured, coded into design, developed, and delivered. Once it's deployed in the real world, we get instant feedback on how it's performing, and if there are any usability issues. DevRev allows us to be able to have a 2-way seamless flow of information without loss of context. That is the holy grail.
Vinod MuthukrishnanFormer COO, Uniphore
The transparency of support data across the organization has allowed support teams to become a strong ally to engineering and product management. “Support is the only layer between the customer and the company and is the only way to understand how the product is performing in the field. With DevRev, we are able to operate in a tool-agnostic way so that data flows freely from different departments,” says Abhiram.
Looking ahead
The ultimate goal that Uniphore has is for every department, from product management to engineering, to have equal visibility of the customer. “We want engineering managers and PMs to be able to plan sprints and product features around user stories that create the most impact”, says Abhiram. “An engineering leader should be able to use support data to learn that a certain component in the product is not working well and then be able to invest in changing it.”
As Uniphore continues to expand further, the culture of support it has created will set the foundation for its growth.
I see DevRev as changing the way we work. Our engagement with DevRev has felt more like a partnership than just buying something off the shelf. Our landscape is constantly changing and we’re frequently introducing new monitoring tools and pieces of information. The agility of the team in responding to these changes has been very impressive.
Abhiram Kramadhati Director - AI GTM & Ops, Cisco
Top Features
- DevRev Airdrop
- Jira bidirectional sync
- Rocketlane integration
- Slack integration
- Salesforce integration
- Knowledge base articles
- Conversation routing
The Benefits
- Migration of legacy data within 6 hours (vs 6 weeks without Airdrop)
- Unified view of all customer interactions from different channels
- Transparency of support data across the organization
- Ability of support team to create Jira tickets directly within DevRev
- Improved collaboration between support, engineering, and product teams.
