SalesTechStar Interview with Juan Jaysingh, CEO at Zingtree

AI powered salestech enables B2B sellers to scale efforts and processes, but only if they are implemented with the right fundamentals; Juan Jaysingh, CEO at Zingtree shares a few tips that can help:

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Hi Juan, tell us about yourself and your journey so far. Take us through Zingtree’s story and how it evolved over the years?

I’ve always been fascinated by the potential for technology to streamline complex processes and improve people’s lives. That passion has guided me throughout my career, which started in tech consulting before founding my first startup, ZeeMee, a social platform to help high school students transition to college. I then joined Universal Tennis to lead the rollout of their community platform to clubs and academies worldwide.

In 2020, I became CEO of Zingtree and focused on scaling the company as a profitable, B2B SaaS leader. Zingtree started with a simple idea — to help businesses streamline complex support issues with interactive decision trees that guide customers and agents to resolutions. Today, our AI-powered platform enables over 700 enterprises worldwide to automate support processes across all customer touchpoints.

By making it easy to build smart workflows, Zingtree empowers agents to resolve issues faster and more effectively. The platform also drives better self-service, allowing customers to troubleshoot on their own. The results are transformational — major reductions in contact volume, improvements in key metrics like average handle time and first contact resolution, and, most importantly, happier customers. We’re excited to continue innovating to make support as seamless as possible in the years ahead.

Can you discuss some of the biggest lags in modern digital CX journeys and how new-age sales tech and AI-powered platforms are enabling better experiences?

One of the biggest pain points in digital customer support today is the sheer volume of data and systems agents must navigate. Support information is often scattered across a dozen or more tools, making it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for agents to piece together the full context needed to efficiently resolve issues. This not only leads to lengthy handle times and frustrating back-and-forth, but also takes a mental toll on agents who are under immense pressure to find answers quickly.

AI-enabled platforms like Zingtree tackle this by acting as a unified front end that connects all the backend systems. By guiding agents through the optimal troubleshooting steps based on customer context, AI helps them resolve issues faster. By enabling more self-service, AI relieves the burden on agents so they can focus on higher-value work. The result is faster issue resolution, lower costs, and happier agents and customers.

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For marketers or sales teams setting up these types of tools for the first time to drive better automated responses, what are some of the fundamentals to keep in mind?

The biggest mistake I see companies make is trying to automate support with AI before getting their underlying processes and knowledge in order. Throwing a chatbot or virtual agent at a broken process will only lead to frustrating experiences for customers and agents. Instead, the first step should always be to map out and optimize your support workflows, establish clear resolution paths for common issues, and build out a robust, accessible knowledge base.

Once you have that strong foundation, you can start to layer on AI to automate tasks within those established parameters. This way, you can be confident that the AI will follow your approved processes and not go off the rails with nonsensical or even damaging responses. It’s also essential to have a clear data integration strategy from the start, as the AI needs access to the comprehensive customer context to provide relevant, personalized support. Taking the time upfront to build out these underlying systems will pay huge dividends in the long run in terms of reliability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

How do you feel AI will change the overall customer experience game down the line?

When implemented thoughtfully, AI can transform customer experience. In the coming years, we’ll see wider adoption of AI tools like intelligent virtual assistants that can understand context and intent and resolve a high percentage of routine customer issues.

This will enable a larger volume of customer interactions to be handled through automated self-service, with seamless escalation paths to human agents when needed. Agents, in turn, will be empowered by AI to resolve complex cases faster. We’ll see many frustrating lags in customer journeys eliminated as AI enables quicker, more personalized resolutions across channels.

However, AI will never replace the need for human connection and critical thinking. The most successful companies will find the right balance between AI automation and agent enablement. When implemented thoughtfully, AI can augment agents’ capabilities by providing real-time insights and recommendations. But ultimately, it’s the human touch that will remain the heart of great customer service.

If you had to highlight a few top B2B SaaS brands whose end-to-end CX journey piqued your interest; which ones would you highlight here?

While Zingtree focuses on solutions for B2C companies, there are many commonalities in terms of what it takes to provide great customer service in B2B. I admire what companies like Salesforce, AWS and Atlassian do from a customer support and success perspective…

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