Global Fintech Interview with Sagar Rajgopal, President and Chief Customer Officer at Ubiquity

Hi Sagar, please tell us about your journey with Ubiquity since co-founding the company over 10 years ago.

Over the past decade, my journey with Ubiquity has been a thrilling and fulfilling experience. Our founding vision was to provide outsourced services that could offer clients and their customers genuine and differentiated value, particularly in heavily regulated or complex industries.

As we continue to expand, a significant aspect of my role involves working closely with our leadership team to evolve our service offerings and support clients’ growth. This entails staying up to date with market trends while balancing growth with our identity as a provider who does things differently. Our growth has been synonymous with that of our clients, and we have helped them scale efficiently and improve their businesses. Witnessing the successes of our clients over the years has been truly inspiring.

The challenge of managing growth is universal, but our experience has made us a pivotal partner in facilitating successful scaling for fintech businesses. My current focus is to ensure that our operations expand in tandem with our clients’ needs, with our people, processes, and technologies seamlessly aligned to position Ubiquity and our clients for another decade of success.

How should fintech companies embrace CX to transform their business more significantly?

Everyone says CX is vital, but when you’re dealing with people’s money, you have to add an extra layer of sensitivity, rigor, and diligence to your CX. There’s a race to automate, and self-service is important. But you have to make sure your customers have a path to a real-life human being.

At the same time, you need the infrastructure to extract and feed CX insights into every aspect of your business. As organizations grow, silos often emerge, creating structural, procedural, and cultural barriers that impede collaboration. Implementing an effective CX platform with feedback loops that inform all areas of the business and feed back into CX can dismantle these barriers. Consistently collecting, analyzing, and sharing data helps you determine whether you’re meeting customer expectations or unwittingly creating problems in the customer journey that you need to fix.

CX data can provide valuable insights for organizations, including identifying customer needs and pain points for product teams, optimizing customer journeys and engagement for sales and marketing, and aiding in fraud prevention efforts.

By adopting a CX-centric approach, fintech companies can not only enhance customer satisfaction but also discover efficiencies, streamline processes across the organization, and reduce costs.

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Recognized as the #1 CX provider for disruptors and innovators across financial services, could you highlight how exactly Ubiquity is serving the customers’ needs?

Unlike traditional outsourcing focused on minimizing costs, Ubiquity was founded on the principle that our clients deserve better. We have developed a partner-centric approach, delivering more value than merely addressing customer inquiries. As genuine brand ambassadors, we leverage our extensive industry expertise and deep understanding of our clients’ businesses and strategic objectives to create tailored CX management programs that cater to their current and future requirements. Our services include:

• Customized solution design and implementation, enabling our clients to be agile and adaptable in response to market shifts.
• Personalized agent training, nesting, program mastery, coaching, and quality assurance, ensuring faster proficiency and excellence.
• Continuous insights and business transformation derived from frontline customer interactions and feedback, optimizing the customer journey and driving improvements throughout our clients’ operations.

How is AI and ML playing its role to solve your business challenges, fueling growth, and driving superior customer experiences?

We see AI as a tool to empower our employees, not replace them. In complex sectors like financial services, AI speech analytics offers advantages such as flagging compliance issues and transaction anomalies in real-time, streamlining customer dispute and fraud claim resolution.

Aigent, an AI platform incubated at Ubiquity, supports customer service agents during calls, providing optimal problem-solving solutions by detecting trigger words. The platform anticipates call dispositions, identifies interaction patterns, and promotes successful first-call resolutions.

AI can also transform quality and training by applying speech recognition and natural language processing to call recording data, pinpointing exceptional and subpar customer interactions. This data-driven approach is more strategic and efficient than manual reviews and can reveal new insights and trends.

Moreover, AI helps analyze agent behavior during customer interactions, providing feedback for agent toolbox enhancements. Based on agents’ tool usage, we may establish API-based integrations with external systems.

AI enables understanding customer preferences and agent behavior through data capture, delivering timely and appropriate interactions. As more businesses harness AI’s power, we expect improvements in efficiency, compliance, and bottom-line results. At Ubiquity, we view AI as a catalyst for refining internal processes and deepening customer relationships.

The cost and access to data are major challenges for outsourcing. What are your strategies to overcome these legitimate challenges?

Effectively using data from CX interactions is vital for efficient customer support operations and superior experiences. In-house data analysis can be challenging and costly, whereas BPOs like Ubiquity offer cost-effective, efficient solutions with the necessary technology, training, and analysts. Our experience with numerous clients across industries gives us a deeper understanding of data techniques and trends in each market.

A key BPO value proposition is not just providing data but advising fintech firms on leveraging customer interaction and operational performance data to enhance productivity and create seamless customer journeys.

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You are constantly innovating to help challenger brands supercharge operations. Could you please tell us some more about its tech aspect?

Alongside AI, we’ve developed other cutting-edge technologies that facilitate customer self-service and enable agents to deliver top-tier CX. Our dedicated subject matter experts and proprietary technology tools help clients optimize their CX operations, dispute and chargeback management, fraud mitigation, and service delivery.

For instance, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that effectively resolves customer issues instead of causing frustration can significantly impact customer satisfaction and support costs. Our inCall IVR offers self-service data integrations, callback options, and predictive applications that anticipate call drivers, increasing call containment by up to 84%.

Ubiquity’s inTouch® performance-management platform provides operational visibility that promotes efficiency, quality, and cost savings. Real-time customer feedback allows managers to promptly address concerns, coach agents, and monitor performance against client KPIs, leading to a 20% average increase in satisfaction scores.

By striking the right balance between technology and live agent support, we can deliver a more human-centric CX that makes customers feel acknowledged and valued.

What are some of the top fintech trends you’re seeing get more attention in 2023?

Several prominent trends are emerging in the fintech landscape:

• Cost reduction and profitability: Due to economic factors like rising inflation and a contracting funding environment, fintechs face increasing pressure to reduce costs and enhance profitability. Companies often look to customer service as a starting point for cost-cutting measures. However, it’s essential to adopt a strategic approach that includes optimizing operations rather than merely reducing headcount or relocating to lower-cost regions. Consultative BPOs and AI tools can be instrumental in this regard.
• Mergers and acquisitions (M&A): We anticipate more M&A activity involving banks merging with each other, fintechs consolidating, and banks acquiring fintechs to access innovative technologies they could not develop in-house.
• Embedded finance: This trend, which integrates financial services within existing apps or platforms, simplifies users’ experience in managing their finances. Nearly any digital experience and many physical ones can open the door for credit or payments transactions—from earned wage access for gig workers to customized money management tools for gamers. We expect new models and partnerships to emerge to reach consumers in a variety of new ways. Simultaneously, businesses and banking/fintech partners can create new revenue streams, ultimately fostering customer loyalty.

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Thank you, Sagar! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]