#79 - Rob May, CEO of Talla - On achieving Support Inbox Zero by making people and AI work in combo

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around customer support that has the power to 10x your ticket response times. My guest is Rob May, Co-founder and CEO of Talla.

Rob has a background in engineering, business development, and management and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a MBA from the University of Kentucky.

In October 2008, he co-founded and became CEO of Backupify, which provided a secure second copy of cloud data. Their clients included companies like Salesforce, Google Apps, and more. Backupify was acquired by Datto in December 2014, and Rob became the SVP of business development, overseeing Backupify's integration after the acquisition.

In August 2015, May co-founded and became CEO of Talla, which develops machine intelligence, virtual assistants, and conversation UI/UX for enterprises. In addition, Talla is launching a decentralised bot registration and marketplace platform, BotChain.

When I learned about the positive impact Talla has on support organizations, I instantly invited Rob to my podcast. We explore his views on what’s broken in market for ‘search’ and how that’s actually leading to unwanted behavior. We also address his learnings on technology adoption, and why this is not only of fundamental importance to increased user productivity, but also to keep your solutions always in sync with the reality of the business.

Here are some of his quotes:

Talla is in the customer support automation space. And what we do is we take your, not just your ticketing data, but your actual support content, we ingest it and understand it.

The biggest thing that we see in our customers, and the reason that they do this is, you know, hiring is a challenge right now, at least, you know, here in the US, the labor market is pretty tight. And so we've sold to a lot of very high growth tech companies who need to hire 150 support reps this year, and they just can't.

So they're looking for ways for how they make their existing support reps more productive. And we know that, you know, with Talla that can be anywhere from sort of 20 to 60% productivity increased, depending on the nature of their business.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How you can kill two birds with one stone by adopting a UX/UI driven way of thinking about Machine Learning.
2. Why succeeding with AI is not so much about segmenting the market by traditional demographics but more about addressing the right mindset.
3. How to make solid progress by following a ‘test and invest’ approach.