Riding the High Tide during COVID-19 Times

We talked to Devashish Datt Mamgain of Kommunicate about the use of chatbots while keeping the human touch intact with personalized customer relationships.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Devashish Datt Mamgain: We have been doing well and continuously finding ways to have good physical and mental health for us and everyone around us.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Kommunicate.

Devashish Datt Mamgain: I started my career working in a startup, Webyog, during the last recession. Later, I joined Azuga, a connected vehicle technology company. I was among the initial hires in the technology team. Adarsh and I worked together in Azuga before co-founding Kommunicate.

How does Kommunicate innovate? 

Devashish Datt Mamgain: Kommunicate is a customer conversation platform that automates support agents’ work, reduces the cost of scaling support using chatbots, and provides faster resolution time with 24×7 availability.

Kommunicate brings the best of chatbots while keeping the human touch intact with personalized customer relationships.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Devashish Datt Mamgain: Customers: Pandemic impacted businesses for our customers in travel, hospitality, etc. We have seen a spike in Educational organizations leveraging Kommunicate to handle their support queries efficiently.

Team: Our team started remote work from mid-March. After a few initial hiccups of remote working, we figured out the tools and processes required to make work from home efficient.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Devashish Datt Mamgain: With all uncertainties and communication gap challenges in remote work setup, we still took the decision to work remotely for a year. 

We saw companies laying off people and doing salary cuts. While they had their own reasons for it, we decided not to follow the herd. We continued with salary appraisals and hiring plans. We have a transparent company culture where all revenue numbers, expenses are shared with the team in monthly all-hands meetings. With everyone’s effort in the team and a bit of luck, we sailed through it while maintaining profitability.

The lesson learnt is to be always ready for unknown situations, understand your own situation, and take decisions accordingly.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and Kommunicate in the future?

Devashish Datt Mamgain: On a personal side, my way of handling stress is listening to music, watching standup comedy, and spending time with my family. 

On a company level, in order to ensure good physical and mental health for the team, we started Fun Friday events, games, and casual discussions to boost morale and cool off the team. We started a physical and mental health improvement program that encourages people to talk openly with each other, reimbursements for mental and physical health services, apps, and goods.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Devashish Datt Mamgain: There are 2 types of products and competitors in the market:

• Traditional Email/Ticketing based support – Zendesk, Freshdesk
• Chat-based support – Intercom, Crisp

Kommunicate brings a unique human + bot hybrid model with Codeless chatbot integration. Our Customers love the fact that they have automation and a fallback to human agents to keep the human touch intact. 

Your final thoughts?

Devashish Datt Mamgain: 2021 will be a good year with COVID impact going down, and the world will start living fearlessly again. 

Post-COVID, lots of things will change forever, people have formed new habits, and the majority of them will continue like remote work, online education, on-demand services, etc.

We look forward to seeing Kommunicate play a key role in helping more organizations automate their customer support.

Your website?

www.kommunicate.io