CEOs You Should Know - Service Mob Broadcast

Paul Corvino sits down with Anuj Bhalla. Anuj Bhalla is the Founder & CEO of serviceMob, an analytics software company for the customer service industry powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
This is CEOs You Should Know.And now from iHeartMedia, here's Paul Corvino.
This is Paul Corvino, Division Presidentof iHeartMedia in sunny Los Angeles,
California, with another episode of CEOsYou Should Know. Hey. Today I
have the pleasure of speaking with anujof Ballah, the founder and CEO of

(00:23):
service Mob, an analytics software companyfor the customer service industry. It's powered
by AI and machine learning. ANews has been named Top ten Entrepreneur by
Entrepreneur Magazine of Forbes Next one thousandand A La Times CEO Visionary, Welcome
A News. Thank you great tobe here. Hey, So before we

(00:45):
get started, I like to doa little quick, rapid fire question answer
just to get your brain thinking andyour mouth moving. You ready, ready?
Answer quickly? I guess I am. Yeah. Let's go for it.
Okay, with the A summer summerski you a beach vacation beach Michael
Jordan or Tom Brady Jordan, godfatherof Star Wars, Godfather, Beatles are

(01:07):
Stones, Wow Beatles, Daniel Craigor Sean Connery. Sean Connery celebrity people
say you remind them of probably GeorgeCloney. You know so maybe just based
on looks. You know, Idon't know, that's not true. Sorry.

(01:27):
We got you talking, we gotyour mouth moving, we got your
brain working. Okay. So that'swhat I want to do is we would
like to find out in this seriesthat we do really like to learn about
your journey. What was the paththat you took and how did you get
to the point where you eventually ableto be the founder of a service mob.

(01:49):
Yeah. So you know, Iwas born in nineteen eighty one in
the heartland of America, New Jersey, New Jersey. Where abouts to New
Jersey is Englewood, New Jersey.Actually right, what is right across the
I'm a New York boy. Sookay, okay, So but you know,
I grew up in the Tri Statearea and you know, had an
affinity for science, computer science,you know, fairly young. I went

(02:13):
out west to Berkeley, you know, just you know, here in northern
California, and it was it appliedmath and computer science. Not having any
great marketable skills outside of this datascience world, I actually took a job
in management consulting with Eccentum when Igraduated. I was part of their customer
strategy practice kind of using the sameidea of all these pieces of information that

(02:38):
were flooding the enterprise to understand customersbetter in a lot of ways than they
understood themselves. You're learning analytics,you're learning all of the new technology that's
there at the time. So atthis point you came up with an idea,
Oh yeah, so I'm seeing likea revolution because so much interest is

(02:59):
going into this area and that thatwas unfettered for the next you know six,
you know, six seven years whilestill at Eccentric, and then right
around twenty fifteen, you know,I decided, you know, I'm working
with the Googles and working with Amazonand Microsoft and really helping them make the
most out of this data. ButI'm seeing that nobody is doing this right,
right, nobody To this day,I don't still don't believe that anyone's

(03:22):
doing customer service one hundred percent right. But that said, I saw a
massive opportunity in you know, howdo we understand these experiences that customers are
having with brands? Can we explaincustomer service not as just a bottom line
cost savings or we're just cutting heads, but really as ambassadors of a brand

(03:42):
that can improve customer experiences and improvethose economic relationships with companies. So if
we do customer service right, thisis a profitable enterprise for a company.
It's not just a bottom line savings, but it's also a top line growth
driver. And part of building thissoftware was to go on a mission to
finally take this squishy concept of customerexperience and pour concrete on it and really

(04:06):
say, this is how we defineit. And if we can define it,
if we can now measure action andobserve it, we can now improve
it, right, Because how doyou improve something you can't measure? You
can't right? And that was thebig problem, and I still think today.
We have a lot of companies.Every single CEO will tell you.

(04:26):
I'm sure on this show you meeta lot of folks there's not a single
CEO out there that doesn't want toimprove the customer experience. Right, But
again, how do we do thatif we don't know how to measure it?
And that's the gap we're trying tofill with service farms. So how
did you do it? So weactually built the data model that actually reflected
the customer experience itself. And whatI mean by that is, you know,

(04:48):
I can ask you know, youa fact, how many customers do
you have? You know, howmany listeners do you have in your audience?
These are facts you can probably pullfairly easily. How many active customers?
How many calls did I have onTuesday last week? These are all
facts you can get. If Iasked you how many customer experiences did you
have last Tuesday? You might lookat me. Funny is it's not meant

(05:10):
to be a facetious question. Butthe reason I ask it is because nobody
knows the answer to that question.You know, the response is, well,
how do you measure the customer experience? We'll give that That is that
now done through AI? Yeah,so now with the with the use of
AI, we're able to take allthese different dimensions of the customer experience.
So it's not just you know,your contact into at and T or to

(05:34):
comcasts. It's it's really looking atyour holistic experience. It's that time you
walked in the store to try tofix your iPhone right at an Apple Genius
bar. It's that time you call, It's that time you chatted all around
that issue. All that invested timehas to be brought together across all these
different systems that make customer service workto now create a data model, a

(05:57):
new unit of measurement that we callall the experience. So how would any
listener that's out there that owns abusiness that needs to upgrade their customer service
department? How are they get incontact with you? They should send us
an email that can send it toHello at servicemob dot com or send an
email to me on new Jnuja atservicemob dot com. And we're always happy
to work with customers to help themtake their customer service to the next level.

(06:21):
Thank you so much. And Newsreally enjoyed having you on the show
again where with a News Badla.He's the founder and CEO of Service Mob.
Thank you. It was a veryinteresting show. I'm sure our listeners
enjoyed it. This is Paul Corvinofor CEOs you Should Know saying thank you
for listening. Listen to CEOs youShould Know on the iHeartRadio app.