Khadim Batti on Whatfix, Userization, and Making Enterprise Software Work for People

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.63) Welcome back to the winner's circle, everybody. I'm here today with Kadim from WhatFix. They are the latest excellence in customer service award winner. And this is a really interesting one because not only are they out there helping other companies with their customer service, but they're also using their own tools to make their own tools better. So Kadim, welcome to the Winner Circle and congratulations on all the awards. Khadim Batti (00:22.412) Thanks for my having on the show for Dice. really happy to receive that a award and thanks to my wonderful team. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:29.159) Yeah. It's always good to have a good team behind you to nominate you for these types of things. Now, before we get into it too deep, give us a little bit of background on what FIX is and kind of how you guys got started, because you're not new to this. Khadim Batti (00:42.72) Yes, it's a very interesting story. So it's started by me and my co-founder Varak Kumar. we started with solving a different problem statement, helping small businesses globally to improve their online ROI, social media visibility, search visibility. And what we encountered was this business owners who are not utilizing the underlying technology or software in a right intended way or efficient way. And many of them were struggling to even adapt our own software, what we built for them. And that's where the concept and the idea of what fix started. If I have to extrapolate to larger enterprises, every large enterprise today spends several hundreds of millions of dollars every year to build their the digital transformation, to build their technology infrastructure, hundreds of software solutions like ERB, CRM, CLM, you can name it. but are they receiving those ROIs? Those ROI or the intended outcome will not happen until unless people utilize it, or the employees or the customers utilize it in the right way. That's what Quadfix solves. It creates a layer of digital adoption on top of this stack across software applications, helps by giving the right nudges, right information in the right place, and ensures that people utilize the technology, get the power of technology in the in the intended way. And ensure the process compliance, and and ensures the outcome. You can say in a single line analogy if I have to give, it's like a GPS for software. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (02:16.955) Yeah, and it's really interesting. I've been in the software game and enterprise software for a long time. And you always saw these big rollouts and even, you know, with either customer platforms or even internal platforms. And, you know, you would spend millions of dollars rolling these out and then kind of do this cursory training and check the box. Hey, I train sales on the new platform or I trained operations on the new platform. And then you'd look at it a month later going, How are we doing? And so you guys are really working and you've been working for a long time on this digital adoption technology to really help users get inside of the platform to understand kind of the purpose and the application of the platform. So it's not just like, hey, click this, do that. So tell us a little bit about kind of what drew you into this kind of digital adoption, you know, industry. Khadim Batti (03:03.244) Yeah, so we started with helping or solving the problem of adoption of our own platform. earlier we used to build a platform called Search Enabler, and where our customers were struggling to realize or the way it was designed to use. And they used to come back to us for a lot of help, and that's where we build WhatFix to solve that problem. And once we integrated with our Search Enabler solution, a lot of our customers came back and told us. Hey, can I use this for my customers? Can I use this for my employee? And that's where it really made us think hard. Okay, can I actually give this platform to my customers? And we pivoted from our search enabler solution to Whatfix. to give some examples, let's say in insurance, claims insurance. there was a calamity, or suddenly there's like hundreds of claims happening because of fire. Earthquake during earthquake or any such. And and people are really struggling at that point and they need quick response. And imagine an insurance agent struggling to respond quickly. They need complaints, they need compliance code and all this information. We have helped we have helped several insurance companies, their agents to ensure that compliance and response times are to the dot. once somebody logs a claim. They get turnaround time within within like tens of minutes, not several days. And that similarly, in one of our for one of our customers, when they they deliver shipments of medical supplies, sometimes because they don't capture the information correctly, it gets delayed by several weeks. But because Whatfix ensures and gives them the right nudge, what information to be collected, what information to be filled. It gets first time right, and that several weeks delay can be avoided and shipments can happen in within like 24 hours. So many such use cases WatFix is able to solve. without WatFix, when companies let's say deploy several millions of dollars for any transformation, they typically expect 60-70 percent gain in terms of their ROI or efficiency, and when they add Khadim Batti (05:25.772) Or when they add WattFix on top of it, there's additional fifty to seventy percent gain. So a company which is spending three million dollars, they can expect eight to nine million dollars outcome with Wattfix, it can go up to thirteen to fourteen million dollars. And that's what we have seen with several of our customers. Like today we cater to seven hundred customers globally with eighty five fortune five hundred. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:43.307) Now you've you use a lot the word userization. And I like this this term that you guys have come up with. It's really kind of making making software adapt to users instead of users adapt to software. Tell us how you kind of came up with that idea and kind of how it flows into into what fix. Khadim Batti (05:47.214) Yes. Khadim Batti (06:02.508) Yeah, so software, if you know the when software gets deployed, they design for one cohort. Okay, this particular process is designed for all the managers. This process is designed for all my outbound marketers. but within that cohort of ten managers or within that cohort of ten marketers, each one behaves differently based on their skills, their context they understand, their experience level. Or or or or I'll they give you an example of real life, right? Like every everyone gets the same insurance for car amount. But everybody drives differently. Like you might be a better driver than me. you might be driving a safe route versus what I drive. I'm driving on hilly mountains and all this, they're more prone to accidents, probably. So why should we both of our insurance be the same thing, right? our insurance amount should be the same. It should be very, very specific to you, very, very specific to me based on the telemetry, what it can collect, how safely you drive, what Routes you take regularly versus I do. Exactly the same thing. What we realized while working with several of our customers and users, why should software be designed for a set of users? Why can't each software or technology adapt to every individual's need? So rather than pushing individuals to adapt to underlying technology, can technology adapt to users? And that's what we call userization. So our our mission was to ensure that userization happens for all the software in the world and with AI. I I th this was even actually like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen when we started working on userization philosophy and the concept. And with AI, this is just accelerated because AI helps us to understand the context. AI helps us to customize to every individual's need. And userization well just got accelerated. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:46.259) Well, it's a genius idea if you really think about it, because you know the ad companies have been doing this for years. I'm on the marketing and sales side and they're bringing us this personalized ads based on exactly what we've clicked on, what cookies we have, what preferences we have. And it's really shouldn't be any different for software. The context really matters, the context and the user. If you think about, you know, again in my world a sales user. You know, sales user might be coming in to put notes about a meeting, which is very different context than putting in, you know, an opportunity in in Salesforce or something like that. And so the screens are different, the context is different. Is that kind of what usertization is all about? Khadim Batti (08:23.535) That's right. Like for example, if you if you're using a CRM, there are like 20 sellers in a company, and every seller has the same set of processes. They have to discuss with the prospect, they have to fill up all the information, whether they are selling to an insurance industry or a pharmaceutical industry or anyone. The processes are more or less rigid, they are built for managers. Now imagine like which context WhatFix can collect. And if a seller is actually working with a specific prospect in the pharmaceuticals, It should be able to automatically nudge, saying, Hey, these are the typical compliances the pharmaceutical industry needs, and you need to pitch that. These are the typical use cases which your pharmaceutical companies actually utilize this your software for. So it can be very, very specific for that particular opportunity, for that particular use case, for that particular moment. maybe another good example I can give you is let's say the seller is new, and there is a meeting coming up for With the CISO of a large company, information security officer. And this seller is new to my company or any other company and has never done an information security meeting. So maybe Wattfix understands that and immediately gives a nudge saying, Hey, be f I do understand that four hours down the line you have a meeting with the CISO on security discussion, why don't you go through this presentation or 30 minutes crash course or a training so that you are well prepared? So these are very, very specific and personalized to individuals, and that's what visualization is. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:47.265) it it it is super smart. Now you guys work actually with a lot of Fortune five hundred, a lot of large enterprises. You've seen, you know, you I you've been in this game long enough before AI, before machine learning, you guys were doing this as well. Walk us through kind of some of the failures. What does it look like when you don't have this adoption technology and this digital adoption technology? What happens with kind of employees, IT departments, and CFOs? Khadim Batti (10:13.945) The the uplift what we have seen with or with with a digital adoption, like typically thirty to forty percent ticket reduction happens, whether it's tickets are coming for a company from customers or internal employee tickets, as a straightforward thirty to forty percent if they can implement it in a better way, it can have even sixty, seventy percent upside. sales, like say in our case itself, when we dock for what fix, you mentioned earlier. the win rate goes up. Like say our average win rate, which used to be 15, 16% when we started using ourselves WhatFix Better, the wind rate went up to 21%. So there was like 5% junk. That's a huge if imagine the company is several billions of dollars, even a 0.5% movement actually can change a lot of things. And as I was mentioning earlier, compliance is like if the if if the claims are coming in, if the medical supplies have to be delivered, if if you reduce two weeks or one week in terms of turnaround time. It can it can result in millions of dollars of saving or upside for any Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:11.712) The the thing that shocks me is that we've been at this software game for a little while now, right? And we know kind of how users act. Platforms like yours exist because we're still not great at designing software. Well why do you think that is? And and is it changing with AI? Is it gonna is AI gonna bring us kind of more cohesive with platforms like yours? Khadim Batti (11:25.614) Khadim Batti (11:34.024) Yeah, I I think it's a very broad question we can keep on debating for long. but think about like when the enterprise softwares are built, each enter each software gets customized for specific need of an enter large enterprise or companies, right? Like and that's why hundreds of large SIs exist. They understand requirement, let's say, of a Pepsi or versus general electric versus a Ford. Understand that processes, take CRN, take ERP, customize it for them. It's very difficult to simplify or come up with an out-of-box UX or usability which can cater to all different kinds of companies. So it it's hard. So that's why most of these large enterprises become a platform which can be customized. And that's and you need a pla layer on top of it like WatFix, which can actually cater to individual companies' need for processes. And that's why it exists. As we move forward in in the AI world, there are two ways to think about it. Software gets commoditized. So maybe there will be 10x of softwares. Every company will create a lot of softwares for themselves. The problems they used to solve without software, maybe everyone they will start creating point software. So maybe more softwares are there. There's a more need for adoption. Another way to think about it now, WotFix also comes inbuilt with intelligence. As I was mentioning about userization, we can give more just in time nudges, which are very specific to make individuals more productive. They can use the power of not only underlying software. But they can use the power of AI as well. So for example, if somebody is working on a CRM or on a specific opportunity, and they also have AI deployed as part of their company, WhatFix can actually bridge that gap between them. based on that particular use case at that point, Watfix can actually trigger saying get the I'll get the information from Copilot or I'll get the information from Chat GPT or and and and make sure that AI power is getting used by every individual. Many of our companies Many of our customers actually use Watfix to ensure AI adoption goes up. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:30.598) Yeah, well and and if you have numbers like that where you can get the increase in revenue, the increase in customer satisfaction, there's you know, these tools do s sell themselves. Now, what I liked about your nomination is it really wasn't about the technology, it was about your team using the technology inside of your own company. So we used to call that dog fooding. And I you know, I was in the voice services business, and so we always did, you know, you you ran all your phone calls over your own network and to tell how the network was working, right? So Khadim Batti (13:37.251) Yes. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:00.761) You guys did this internally, you ran your own tools internally. What did you change when you saw kind of the results initially? Khadim Batti (14:07.887) I think some some numbers pick for themselves, like our CSAT is 99.9%. Right. our SLAs for any tickets are like 10 to 15 minutes at max. So every customer doesn't matter where they are across the globe, any countries they get very quick responses. our NPS coverage for larger enterprises is more than 83% with a score of 53, 55. That's why it's it's higher than any most of the SaaS companies. So those numbers definitely speak. Internally, we use our own products like WatFix adoption platform we use on on top of our CRM, on top of our our other SaaS products, what we use internally. we last year we launched also a solution for simulation, right? Like you have application simulation, you have voice simulation, like how you can create a role which you can play with in terms of how customers would talk to you, objection handling. And this is Read simulated environment, but it's like real time, real life. not only I work and talk, but I also I can actually perform on a process. My customer success department, my customer service department, my sales department, everybody is now using my mirror AI, what we call as mirror. It's a safe environment, it's not a production. We have a lot of customers and I've started using it. So that's my another one. WhatFix adoption solution also came up with our own age we also started creating agentic DAC. so primarily three different roles. we have content creators or content authors who create content using botfix which can be used by consumed by employees or and customers. So we create an authoring agent. So 30 to 40 percent of authoring effort really went down. We keep on we will continue to add more you know capabilities to it. So probably year down the line we should have seventy-eight percent of content creation should be automated. now the input of content creation, what content to be created should come from analysis, how people are using the software. So we had a product called analytics, product analytics, where we are shipping it with the author insight agent, which continues to analyze how the usage patterns, gives gives the recommendation what content should be created, where are the process gaps, where are the drops. Eventually this will also feed back to the authoring agent to create content on the fly. And then there's a there's a guidance agent which actually creates the summary, brings that userization nudges for the users. Khadim Batti (16:32.186) So all these three agents, if you look in conjunction, they create a loop and it will make the whole adoption journey also more agent. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:39.685) Well, you the fascinating thing about you rolling this out, is not only are you using your own tools to make your own software better, but you're actually making your people better. Tell us a little bit about what happened inside of the customer service organization. I know that was a pretty amazing statistic. I think zero attrition over two years, which in customer service world and the enterprise, anywhere in the enterprise is pretty unheard of. Khadim Batti (17:05.442) Yeah, when you get ninety nine point nine percent of your CSAT score, I think people don't want to leave the organization. See, if you look for ice in AI, if you look at AI transformation or any kind of a large transformation, there are two sets of companies. One set of company which would take your new technology and try to force fit in your existing processes. they force fit the existing roles and responsibility to use the new technology. And the upside is not substantial. Whereas forward-looking companies, innovators, or early they take the new technology and they reimagine the work they do with that technology. So with AI transformation within WhatFix, also, and I'm seeing with we are pushing a lot of our customers, they need to start reimagining how the work is done. So instead of using my AI to just ensure that a customer support person responds the ticket much faster. Can the role evolve? Can the customer support representative add more value to their role in terms of understanding the business use case of the customer, spending more time on the research rather than just tickets? Because now they have more time because they use, they are leveraging the AI. So when you when you change the roles and responsibility, when you start reimagining the role, people love that challenge. People know that there's a lot of value getting added to their experience and they don't want Russ Fordyce 🏆 (18:30.241) What was the most surprising thing you learned when you kind of rolled it out to your own team? What did you see that you didn't expect? Khadim Batti (18:38.138) So we I I I I would try to give you another example. we also are trying out a product called Seek, which is a computer use agent which understands the how the software works and it can mimic how human can operate on a software. It's one of the we are piloting with several of our customers. we rolled out to all of our 900 employees. We just wanted to see how people can be creative, right? I can see the use cases from recruitment to customer service. to outbound team, sellers, marketers, everybody started coming up with the different use cases. Like somebody taking a set of event leads from coming out of events or outbound, cust using it to customize responses, automating it to get information from different sources, and and and ensuring that it works in automated fashion. And the like one of our business development persons came back to me last week saying hey before the seek now I'm my and using Seek my output has gone four X. I used to set up one new business meetings every three to four days. Now I'm able to set one meeting every day because Seek does my most of the heavy lifting. It scre for my recruitment team, it screens resumes like every recruiter used to go through each of the profiles. Now they just need to dump the profiles, it just screens it and gives you the score. Like, hey, this other twenty profiles we need to go through. They can review it. So you can reimagine the work everywhere, people are becoming creative. And of course, it's like always eighty, twenty, twenty percent people will take that will be proactive, they'll figure out and then it's contagious. It's it spreads. That's what we have seen. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:16.297) Yeah. Now the other interesting thing I saw from your nomination was that you guys actually are are prioritizing customer feedback and bringing that into your roadmap. It's not just operationalizing. And so I think I read that half of your kind of roadmap is really dedicated towards customer feedback. In my experience, when that happens, you tend to get the loudest customer who has the loudest voice with the the most work in your roadmap. How are you avoiding that and how are you avoiding kind of the chaos of having so many customers kind of inside of the organization? Khadim Batti (20:49.924) Yeah. So you need to balance out in between how much of your requirements can be driven by customers versus what you can foresee the category or the direction evolving. So around fifty to sixty percent we definitely derive from our customers, our roadmap gets derived. But another thirty, forty, fifty percent also derives how the technology is moving, how the market is moving, what we visualize our platform should get there in next twenty-four to forty-eight months. Right. So we try to balance. how we collect requirements from the customers is not just what customers asking for. is actually observing how customers using our software or their software by with with way of analytics. sending our user researchers to their primaries and making them observe how they perform their job with our software. we also collect we also have user groups in which specializes in different industries like we have user group for insurance, we're for banking, for pharmaceuticals. This user group gets together like you can say every two months in different cities, big they sp Present how they are using WattFakes, how they use how it helps in their process, people learn customers learn from each other. Collect when we get a requirement, we try to validate with other customers if that requirement is going to help them as well. So until unless at least three of our large customers don't want that specific requirement in their vertical, we don't take it actually. So we try to balance. apart from that, we also go in whenever we come up with the innovation, which is not come from customer but what we visualize. We create mockups, we sign at least three design partners by sharing them our mock-ups, our direction, what we want to take this feature or a module or a product. And once we have three design partners, we actually take it forward and work it very closely with them. Like as I was mentioning about Seek, we have three design partners for it. The mirror AI, we have three design partners for it. So once we shape the product, then we make it available to the larger groups. So it's very collaborative. just to add, actually, we also have a customer. Like how every company has board, right, which governs a lot of stuff. We have customer advisory board as well. So we meet four times a year. once in person, everyone. we have ten customers, ten to twelve customers from different industry representing product head, myself, my technology officer, my head of sales, we all participate. It's like a two day event. when we meet in person, otherwise it's like every quarter, four to five hours, we show them what we are thinking. Each one comes with Khadim Batti (23:18.532) They help us shape and these are the leading c customers or leading the companies in their cohorts, in their industries. So there are several ways where we collect these requirements and try to balance with innovation and of course we try to avoid if somebody can dominate and shape us push us in one direction. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:37.178) Yeah. It's it was it's always been a challenge that that loud voice and that you know, passionate salesperson or passionate customer driving trying to drive your roadmap. Where do you think DAP goes in the next five years? We've obviously seen this very huge transformation with AI and screen reading and everything else that's going on. You guys have been in this category for a long time. What do you think changes in the next five years? Khadim Batti (24:00.732) Yeah. Adoption of a software or a technology is always going to be a challenge, whether it's a digital transformation, AI transformation, so this shape and form might change. how we give the nudges, how we actually help the employees to become more productive, things might evolve there. so far people were expecting from us that we will help them to guide on using any process or a compliance. As we are going forward, we are We are learning from customers, we are visualizing that not only guide, people are also expecting us to do it on their behalf, saying, hey, I want to do this, just not show me, tell me, just get it done for me. Right. So it's right that rather than just show and tell, can you do it for me and show me the outcome? So that's where the direction it's moving, and that's where our computer use agent seek and mirror AI, which automates training, our agent tech age or AI agents, they're all moving in that direction. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (25:00.501) Now, you guys have been in this business for over a decade. You've raised millions and millions of dollars and you've scaled this enterprise to be really, really an enormous entity. if you were building an enterprise that kind of a SaaS enterprise today and looking to scale it up, what advice would you give founders kind of in this new AI world? Khadim Batti (25:21.435) So I I think when you when you're at some scale, you also carry a lot of baggage, right? Like as I was mentioning in my one of your early questions, that when any new transformation happens or whenever new technology actually you deploy, it's not only forced fitting the technology to in your existing processes and in your existing roles and responsibility of employee, you need to reimagine how people work. If you force fit it, maybe you will see 30-40% scale or efficiency improvement. But if you reimagine the work, you can see the efficiency can go up three to four X. So if I had to redo it, I would reimagine every role, every function, how it works. Of course, we are transitioning. changing 900 people takes time versus starting from scratch when you can reimagine everything from day one. if I had to redo, I would do the same thing maybe at three three X to four X more speed. it would happen at Wortfix. quarter on quarter we are increasing, but maybe if I had to start had the privilege of starting from zero day zero, I would start maybe three to four X faster than what I am to do. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:32.927) Well, everybody wants to go three or four times faster, I think. if if there's one principle on how kind of what fix kind of attack their customer service problem that you want to pass on to others, what would it be? Khadim Batti (26:47.823) I I I think you need to obsess with the maybe I if I have to say SaaS, right? We all in a business of software as a service. I used to quote a couple of times like people that first S of software really dominated. The second S service actually got marginalized. Right? So I would say it should be given equal importance. without strong service, software adoption or software utilization or ROI would be diminished. Right. So I think if you see an AI also everybody's talking delivered service as a software. So I would say do not forget the second S of the SaaS. That's very, very crucial. And once you are obsessed with the service, your processes in your DNA, everything will start building up. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:36.239) This fascinating conversation. I'm so glad there are platforms like yours helping us all make sense of all these new tools that we're gonna have to adopt in this new AI age. I mean, the proliferation of software is gonna be amazing. So thank you and congratulations again on all the awards. Khadim Batti (27:52.187) Thanks for that. Thanks for having me and it was a wonderful chatting.