Most companies buy software and then quietly hope people actually use it. That gap, the one between the purchase order and real adoption, is where millions of dollars usually go to die. Khadim Batti, the co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, has basically built a career on closing that gap, and his approach just earned the company a 2026 Excellence in Customer Service Award.
What makes this win a little different is the proof point. Whatfix does not just sell adoption tools to other people. It runs those same tools on its own teams, and the results are honestly kind of wild. We are talking about a customer service operation that hit numbers most enterprises would frankly assume are typos.
The GPS for Software Nobody Reads the Manual For
Batti describes Whatfix in one clean line that tends to stick: it is like a GPS for software. The idea started years ago when he and co-founder Vara Kumar were running a different product entirely and kept watching customers struggle to use the very thing they had paid for. So they pivoted, and the new mission became obvious. Every big enterprise spends hundreds of millions on digital transformation, yet the ROI only shows up if people actually use the tools in the intended way. That is exactly the job a digital adoption platform is built to do, sitting on top of your software stack to drive real usage.
That problem is still very real, and the data backs it up. A recent Forrester report found that ineffective digital adoption costs mid-sized firms an average of $10.9 million annually, which is a staggering amount of money to leave on the table. Batti, of course, puts a more optimistic spin on the same math. A company spending three million dollars on a transformation typically expects six or seven million in return, and his platform tends to push that outcome up to thirteen or fourteen million. Whatfix now serves roughly seven hundred customers worldwide, including eighty-five of the Fortune 500.
Userization, or Why Your Software Should Know You by Now
Here is the concept Batti keeps coming back to, and it is genuinely smart. He basically calls it userization. Software usually gets designed for one big cohort, like all the managers or all the outbound marketers. But every person in that group works differently, with different skills and context and experience. So why should the software treat them all the same?
He usually uses car insurance as the analogy. Two drivers, frankly, should not pay identical premiums when one cruises safe suburban routes and the other is white-knuckling it through hilly mountain passes. The pricing should really adapt to the actual person. Software, in his view, should do exactly that. Rather than forcing people to bend around rigid technology, the technology ought to bend around them. A new sales rep with a CISO meeting in four hours, for instance, could get a quiet nudge suggesting a thirty-minute crash course before they walk in unprepared.
Marketers have done personalized targeting for years, so it is a bit funny that enterprise software lagged this far behind. Now AI is closing the distance fast, because it can read context and customize for each individual in real time. As Batti put it, the userization idea has been around since 2017, and AI just slammed its foot on the accelerator.
The 99.9% CSAT Number That Sounds Made Up
This is the part of the nomination that really stood out. Whatfix runs its own digital adoption platform internally, a practice the industry usually calls dogfooding, and the customer service numbers are almost suspiciously good. CSAT basically sits at 99.9%. Ticket SLAs typically run ten to fifteen minutes at most, anywhere in the world. The enterprise NPS coverage clears 83% with a score in the mid-fifties, well above most SaaS companies.
Then there is the stat that makes customer service leaders do a double take: basically zero attrition over two years. In a function famous for burning people out and churning through headcount, that is nearly unheard of. Batti's explanation is simple and a little profound. When your team is delivering a 99.9% satisfaction score, people just do not want to leave.
The deeper move, really, was reimagining the role itself. Instead of using AI only to close tickets faster, Whatfix freed up its support reps to spend more time getting to know each customer's actual business. The work got bigger, not smaller, and that turns out to be the thing people stick around for.
Force-Fitting AI Versus Actually Rethinking the Work
Batti basically splits companies into two camps when new technology lands. The first group force-fits the shiny new tool into their existing processes and roles, and they squeeze out maybe a 30 to 40% efficiency bump. The second group, the forward-looking one, reimagines how the work gets done entirely, and those teams can see gains of three to four times. That distinction matters more than ever, since Gartner expects worldwide software spending to top $1.44 trillion in 2026, and an awful lot of that budget will be wasted if adoption stays an afterthought.
Whatfix is clearly living this internally too. The team rolled out a computer-use agent called Seek to all nine hundred employees just to see what creative uses would bubble up. One business development rep told Batti his output went up four times, going from one new meeting every few days to one every single day. Recruiters now dump resumes into the tool and get scored shortlists instead of reading every profile by hand. The pattern is contagious, he says, with the proactive 20% figuring it out first and everyone else following.
How Whatfix Keeps the Loudest Customer From Running the Roadmap
Anyone who has ever built a product knows the trap. Listen too hard to customers and the loudest, most demanding voice ends up steering your entire roadmap. Batti, naturally, has a balance he sticks to. Roughly 50 to 60% of the roadmap comes from customer input, while the rest comes from where the team sees the category heading over the next couple of years.
The validation process is actually the clever bit. A single request does not make the cut until at least three large customers in the same vertical want it. New innovations that come from Whatfix's own vision get three design partners before they go wide. There is even a customer advisory board of ten to twelve leading companies that meets quarterly, with one big two-day in-person session a year. That structure keeps the feedback rich without letting any one account dominate, which is a discipline plenty of companies talk about but rarely pull off.
The Second S in SaaS
If you press Batti for one principle, he lands on something he has clearly said before, and it is sharp. In SaaS, the first S, software, has always dominated the conversation. The second S, service, somehow quietly got marginalized. His advice is to give it equal weight, because without strong service the adoption and the ROI just shrink. Once a company truly obsesses over the service half, he argues, everything else in the DNA starts falling into place.
That philosophy is exactly why the judges took notice. Whatfix did not just claim great customer service. It built the proof into its own walls, ran the experiment on its own people, and posted the kind of numbers that make the rest of us a little jealous. Congratulations to Khadim Batti and the whole Whatfix team on a very well-earned 2026 Excellence in Customer Service Award.
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