Sachin Bhatia of Ameyo Tells Us How They Learned from Being Close to Customers and Launched New Products during the Pandemic

Sachin Bhatia, cofounder, and Global Sales & Marketing Head at Ameyo about the customer experience platform that helps enterprises of all sizes to connect, serve and support their customers and he had the following to say about it. 

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

Sachin Bhatia: Very well. Thank you for asking. I wish the readers are all also safe with their loved ones.

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

Sachin Bhatia: After graduating from IIT-Guwahati, I took my first step towards my career with Hughes Software Systems in the Mobile Networks team and worked on mobile networks and specifically SS7.

I often asked myself, ‘Why are there no global product companies from India?’ In 2001 there were a handful of companies that one could count as product companies. This penetrating thought led me and my fellow cofounders, Bishal Lacchiramka and Nayan Jain, to initiate a journey in building a product company. We were not a product idea led company, but a vision led company.

How does Ameyo innovate? 

Sachin Bhatia: We have been blessed with customers across the globe. For us, it is simple enough. Be close to the customer and listen to their needs of today and extrapolate them to tomorrow. We try and stay ahead of the competition this way. 

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

Sachin Bhatia: With the lockdown being imposed and offices closed, brands asked their contact center agents to WFH. The teams at Ameyo put in tremendous efforts to enable our customers to go remote, and we managed to move 50,000+ agents across 100+ businesses to be work from home ready. 

We also launched several new products like Video KYC to enable REs to onboard customers remotely, Video Contact Center to humanize customer interactions, and collections bot to increase customer coverage for loan collections.

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

Sachin Bhatia: In the first quarter of the pandemic, we froze new hiring and also stopped appraisals. We did not know precisely how deep the impact would. Post Q2, we realized that we were not exposed to the pandemic as some of the single vertical solutions were. If the travel industry was affected, the Edutech vertical was picking up. We were able to announce increments and started hiring in Q2. 

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

Sachin Bhatia: Having a team that you can trust helps a lot. I can have open, candid conversations with the team, and usually, we look at the challenge at hand objectively. In my “me” time, I also spend a lot of time talking to other fellow Indian Saas entrepreneurs to share learnings and learn from their journeys. It’s incredible how the whole Saas Ecosystem came together and is helping one another.

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

Sachin Bhatia: We compete with Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys in the contact center space and Zendesk in the Customer Service CRM space. 

We believe the problems in emerging geographies require unique solutions, and models of the West don’t replicate easily in SE Asia, ME, and Africa. 

Given a large customer base, we are very close to the customer and don’t get distracted by any hype getting created. 

We have recently launched “Remote First” Contact center solutions, and these unique offerings are helping us win more customer trust. 

Your website?

www.ameyo.com