Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the table service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. I'm your host Jordan Hooker and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest founding members of Syncly, Alex Hong and Joseph Lee. Alex and Joseph, welcome to the table.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:19] Speaker C: Thanks for having us. Yeah.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: So glad to have you here guys. So let's just start with kind of a brief background. I'd love to hear from each of you about your background experience, where you're from, what brought you to the place you're at now. Working. Working at Syncly.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: That's great. Yeah.
I'm from Ohio, I'm Joseph and I'm co founder at Syncly and yeah, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my second AI company, the last AI company that I started back in 2015 and there was the first AI boom back then basically the image AI, like computer vision AI stuff. So at the time we used AI to automate quality inspection process for manufacturers. So it was a completely different application using AI. So it was really fun and it, it, it went well. So we ended up selling our company back in 2019 to the. The public company in Boston is called Cognex and we sold it and I was there a few years and moved to Boston and after that I reconnected with my previous CTO starting syncly in 2022 and since then we joined YC winner 23W23 batch. That's when we started building Syncly. And basically what Syncly does is that we basically help the companies to provide the exceptional customer experience. And how we do that is basically we help them understand every customer interaction from different sources like chat, calls, emails, surveys and we help them survey. Okay, here are like a top five customer issues like product gaps or operations gap that you need to deal with right away before they churn. That's what we help our customers and it's been exciting journey since then since yc. So it's been a little bit more than a year and now we have hundreds of customers serving using Syncly and yeah, we are very excited for basically everything we do.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks Joseph. Alex, how about you?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so hi, I'm Alex. I'm a co founder of Syncly. I have a background in E commerce and international sales, B2B sales. I'm mostly the business guy doing a lot of go to market for Syncly and I joined this rodeo with Joseph and the team. I think it's been about two and a half years now. So right before we joined yc, at the time we're working on different products, we've pivoted our way into something more customer centric. There are a lot of, we've learned that there are a lot of companies out there who want to be customer centric but didn't have a scalable way to do so. That's why we decided to focus on this idea of getting ahead of the curve and understanding customers, proactively engage customers. How can we do that? We thought that AI is best at providing that value so we decided to work on it. Ended up getting into IC and launch our products growing about 20, 30% ever since, like month over month, which is great. So so far I think, you know, it's been a great experience working in that, you know, exciting AI. It's, it's a perfect time for anybody to be working in the exciting AI space. And yeah, we like to, you know, enjoy it as much as we can.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Sure, absolutely. Tell me a little bit just as you think about customer experience and AI. I mean I'll tell you as somebody working in customer support, customer experience. I hear from AI startups on a probably daily basis, most of them have a pitch that they've got the thing that's going to solve my problem. And to be honest, probably only about 5% of those that I've seen I've been impressed with. Syncly was certainly one of those. Tell me, tell me what you think AI and customer experience, what that looks like going forward.
[00:04:28] Speaker C: Sure, I can, I can start. So I think there are two primary use cases in CX world. Interesting two use cases. One is probably you, most of them are aware of which is chatbot area where you can actually automate the responses when customers ask something. So that's the one area basically chatbot area where most of CX players are involved and we are in the different avenue, different world which is like analysis part. And I think it's really interesting use cases using AI because you know, not only like AI is good at like answering the customer questions but also it really help out to understand like basically the surface hidden insight out of like a very large amount of data coming from different data format, different data source. So that's why we started looking at this area because it's something that CX people is always working on basically like how to find the valuable insight for the product team or the engineering team or the marketing team. But you know, it's so manual so far. So that's why we try to help Them by automating the analysis and categorization and like sentiment analysis as well. Basically help them find the valuable insights so they can easily share the data within their team.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And I'll tell you, as a CX practitioner, I think that area is the one that I have. I have seen the least of companies coming through with really great solutions. I've seen a lot more GI chatbots as I've, as I've worked through companies reaching out to me and so it's really great to see companies building in this space and in this world. So kind of tilting back to origin story as you think about what you're doing at Syncly, tell me a little bit about your experience at yc. Obviously lots of successful startups coming out of that program would love to hear just about your experience with yc.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Definitely, you know, anti, I mean up your game.
Their expectations are coming out from yc. People are looking at you like you must be smart. You went to YC and you must be doing something that's meaningful, right? Whatever they preach is, it doesn't speak to really the scalability at all. When you first start, you need to nail down what's the hair on fire problem is first, right. And make sure that people are willing to, you know, you know, take the money and actually pay for your product and you validate those three months. And by the end of that three months when you graduate, you have something that you think are, you come away with something that you think is meaningful for a lot of people. You're solving a valid, you know, you know, pain points for somebody. And I think that that experience, going through the experience as a batch with a lot of the co founders, you know, the, you know, bright people, brightest people that you're going to meet in your, you know, in your life and your career, they're all, you know, we all have our own vision and all that. But yes, trying to excel and do well after the graduation is also another challenge. But that's been a very fun process so far. Our, you know, the YC partners are themselves founders as well. So they understand what we're going through and they will give us pinpoint like these are the things that you need to focus on now at your stage, right. Have you defined your problem yet or the pain points yet and what are you doing? So at one point it was pretty, I think our group partner was asking like, how many customers have you talked in the last two weeks? And they were happy with what our answers were and they were like, oh, Alex and Joseph you guys must have been busy. You only talked to like 30 people. Last two weeks. You could have been talked to like 100 people. Right? You should have been. So, yeah, when you're building like that, a lot of the lessons that were learned going through that, the whole program was that, you know, you can never be more close to your customers. And there are a lot of things to be learned and more and more people that you talk to that you define as ICP or your target audience, you'll learn so much about it and you'll find those hidden messages. And when you start getting those, like, you know, customers start repeating things, you start to see those patterns, and that's when you kind of recognize those in the burning pains that you need to address, you need to focus on. So I think we've learned a lot, you know, that.
That, I'll say that would be something that had a profound impact on how we're building our product going forward.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: We've talked a little bit about what Syncly does, using AI to dig into customer sentiment, understand what, where your customers are having challenges, both for the ability to deliver a really great experience in terms of customer support, but also in terms of how do you go back to your product teams and your engineering teams and help them really build things that drive great value for their customers. Talk with me a little bit about why you think companies need to go up this level. I would imagine as you interact with customers, sometimes they're like, well, you know, I've got my Zen through my intercom reporting. I can understand those depends what's going on with my customers with the tags that I've got built. You know, my gosh, I'm a CX leader and I've spent two years building out this tagging taxonomy. Why should I take your product and use it instead of this thing that I've invested so much blood, sweat and tears in to build?
[00:10:25] Speaker B: That's a great question.
So when we first, you know, started and, you know, you end up talking to a lot of potential users, right? In our case, it was people in, you know, customer support industry, customer experience industry, customer success industry, we ended up speaking to about probably over 1,000 people from that industry. And as we talked more and more in the Personas, it became clear to us that there is a growing importance on customer sentiment. And with CSET and nps, your conventional way of understanding customers was just not optimized to capture overall context of customer experience like there throughout their user journey. Whether it's a product gap or the experience that's outside of your product. Sometimes, you know, tech enabled services, what we call like maybe Uber, we don't know how your driver was responding to you or you know, something that was happening offline in person. Right. So CSAT MPS only capture your satisfaction or however your opinion only after the fact that everything's happened. Right. You don't have any visibility throughout when it's happening. So that's when we learn.
And it was low response rate too. CSAT and NPS people really don't respond to that. Right. So that was another thing that we've, you know, constantly run into. So sentiment analysis, like dynamic sentiment analysis. We thought because you guys are already communicating with your customers, these are the, you know, why not analyzing every single conversation that every single reviews, every single multiple touch points that you have with the customers. Right? Because you're already getting that. How about we analyze the sentiments and understand what's driving them happy? What's driving them happy. So sentiment analysis in a way that our answer to that will give you the visibility will give you that, you know, different stages that as they're going through these are the patterns that they show, these are the things that they talk about the most in that stage of, you know, their user journey. So you will have started to have a visibility. A lot of our customers, they do csat, they do mps, but they don't always have visibility into those different stages. And all they look at was usage data maybe, which is of course you get a lot of visibility. But logging into a platform doesn't really say a lot. But when you're already talking, engaging customers on a custom like this daily basis, I think there's a lot of stories to be unfold from there as well. So that's why we think we believe in cinema now. So we believe in this is a great way to getting that visibility into throughout user journey so that you can engage your customer at the right moment before they churn. Of course, you know, Joseph would first say it, but yes, that's why just see said NPS now it's just not enough. Yeah, that's what we do.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. Joseph, how about you insights to add there?
[00:13:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I think Alex covered most of the stuff. So yeah the key difference compared to other customer, let's say other customer supporting tool is that the understanding what the real customer pains become more complicated in a sense that customers complain about your services directly to you. But there are some group of customers who do not talk to directly. Rather they complain about your services on a public space. Which is more concerning. Right. So there's social listening aspects that you need to consider when it comes to, you know, understanding what the rear pains are. So that's why we try to understand your customers voices not only on your customer support tool, but also, let's say Reddit, Facebook or other public forums as well to really help you understand. Okay, here are the, the main issues that you are, you might not be aware of, but that's why where we come in and help you understand the overall customer sentiment and customer issues.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Sure, absolutely.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: We've all seen the terrible Yelp reviews and the Google reviews. So it's definitely good to be able to incorporate that. And having worked in spaces where customers do go to those places as well, it's always been an interesting thing to figure out how to really incorporate, incorporate all of that data into one place. So that's really exciting. I know recently the two of you went on a customer listening tour and I'd love to hear a little bit about that. If you could share a little bit of what that was like, why do you think that was a good idea? Why do you think it was great to get in front of your customers? Did you learn anything as you were on that trip? I would just love to hear about that more.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Joseph, do you want to go?
[00:15:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I can definitely start. So yeah, I mean as we have more and more customers, singly customers for sure.
I mean there was a day that Alex and I talked about, okay, so we do most of our sales over zoom and most of them, you know, we are like not product driven. We are sales driven. The reason being is that we basically wanted to understand our customers needs more through sales process and we do the same thing on our customer success process as well. By the way, we are the one who's doing the sales and the customer success at the same time. So providing end to end services for our customers. So we do, we've done customer success over zoom but it's like 30 minutes so not many things to cover. And we really wanted to understand our customers workflow really deeply to provide the right value to the table. So that's why we decided to go to their offices, see how they work and see how they try to operationalize syncly and basically help them succeed. Right. So that's why we decided to go on the customer for two weeks to the major cities there. Our customers are located San Diego, Miami, New York, London, Montreal and Edmonton. And you know, it was really fun to understand what their plans are and how they work and try to understand the human behind the zoom. As well.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Absolutely. That's awesome. Great to hear.
Well, I guess tell me a little bit too. Just as we kind of wrap up this conversation, what's, what's next for Syncly? You've got a product that's out in the market, you've got customers that are actively using it, finding a lot of value in it. What's next for, for Syncly and for your team?
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that we'd love to be, expand our use cases and cover more, I guess, you know, workflow for our customers. But I think that a lot of there's been a shift as we come out of YC. I think we were at the, when ChatGPT came out and a lot of people had a lot of hypes about AI. I think a lot of people understand better what AI can do and why AI is not optimized for. So and people have different experience about, you know, ChatGPT and all that too. And people are smart, they know how to use AI now and they are adopting AI and one or two tools in their workflow.
So I think in that wave of, you know, know, let's try something AI and because I don't think we can apart, you know, for, for ourselves from AI if you want to work smart, if you want to work more efficiently. So I, I think that, you know, we're in the midst of like a lot of AI tools coming out, but we don't, you know, so you need to focus on really creating the value and make sure that you're hitting the jobs to be done for your clients and make sure you're changing their everyday lives in terms of, you know, know, before Syncly and after Syncly. That's what we're trying to do. So yeah, definitely we'd love to, you know, keep building what our customers would believe in real world use cases that our customers have been telling us about. These are the things that we're trying to accomplish. How can we do that with Syncly? Those are the questions that we've been trying to answer with our, you know, through our product. It's been working well in terms of, you know, once we build that, you know, is we're able to expand it to other use cases, other customers, other people, other users who are interested in, you know, using AI in their workflow as well. So we, you know, hopefully we, we, we build more features, more AI interactive AI piece, more frictionless experience on Syncly. And yeah, we'll love, I mean, you know, and, and expand and grow. I think that's, that would be our focus towards the end of the year going into next year as well.
But yeah, approving the value would be extremely important. And once we do that and once we bring our one by one customers there and I think that the rest will first follow.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for your time. Want to give you an opportunity for any last thoughts you may have before we wrap up.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: I'm very thrilled that from the fact that we help our customers to provide exceptional customer experience, I think it's everyone's problem because everyone want to provide exceptional customer experience. Right.
And it's really aligned to our mission that help our customers to provide like five star customer experience across all their customer journey throughout their company's journey as well. Right. So yeah, I think we started with the help of customers to understand better what their customers are talking about. And starting from that, I think the next step would be how we can actually help them to get more high quality, relevant customer voices throughout their customer journey. So I think we're very excited to that upcoming, you know, value that we're gonna bring to the table as well. So yeah, please stay tuned.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: If somebody wanted to reach out to you guys to learn more about Syncly, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
[00:21:15] Speaker B: So we have a great interactive demo. We just renewed our website as well. So please do visit our website at Syncly app and if you have any questions there should be a link right there. You they'll take you straight to. You can book a call with founders which would be me and Joseph. So we're going to be there to talk to you guys, listen to your stories and I would love to be connecting with other founders and other people going through the journey as well. And please do reach out and we hope to meet you all in the future.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Alex and Joseph, thanks so much for joining us here at the table.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Thank you Jordan for having us.
[00:21:54] Speaker C: Thank you Jordan.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Thanks thanks to our guests Alex and Joseph for joining us today. If you want to learn more about Syncly, you can visit Syncly app. You've been listening to the Table Service podcast hosted by Jordan Hooker, presented by Tableau Consulting, music by Epidemic Sound.
