Scalable Enterprise Feature

Carlos Ponce (00:02):

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged, and today we are getting unplugged with our guest Prithvi Dhelia senior software engineer of Qualtrics. So Prithvi, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Prithvi Dhelia (00:33):

Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here and, you know talk on, you know, some of the interest subjects.

Carlos Ponce (00:39):

Perfect. Awesome. And thank you Wade, as ever for graciously co-hosting the show. And so well, okay, well, let's get it started. Let's get unplugged, and then of course, let's start with you Prithvi. Tell us a little bit about you, you know, your background, your experience, anything you want to say about yourself so that the, the, the viewers can know who you are. Thank you.

Prithvi Dhelia (01:03):

Sure, absolutely. So I'm a software engineer, as you said. I, I work at Qualtrics. You know, I, I was I've always been super passionate about technology. I was, I was the kid. I think I got my first computer, my uncle gifted it to me, and I was eight years old, and I started using, you know, Excel writing formulas that was to order pizzas for, for, you know, at, at scale. So that, that was the idea. You know, we I was in a boarding school. We used to, you know every odd Sunday we'd get this opportunity to be able to order like a Domino's or something like that. Wasn't easy to order it for like a hundred people or so you know, at once, writing down in paper, getting all things wrong. So made an excel for that. And, you know, that's when I discovered like, you know how much more, you know, how you can achieve efficiency. I think the journey never stopped, but I didn't really know how to make a career out of it you know, until, until, you know, later I went to college. So I did that at Purdue in Indiana. And then I worked a couple of years at Microsoft and now I'm here at Qualtrics.

Carlos Ponce (02:06):

Perfect. Thank you so much, Prithvi, for telling us about, a little bit about EU now, let's tell us a little bit about Qualtrics. What is the value company's value proposition? What problem are you solving? Can you elaborate about, a little bit about Qualtrics, please?

Prithvi Dhelia (02:24):

Yes, absolutely. So Qualtrics is a company that is one of the pioneers of a space called experience management. At the core of it we try to gather data and sentiment from the customers through surveys and other means and then turn it into actionable items for, you know, that the enterprises can act upon. So for instance, you know, you're an airline business, you know at the end of your journey, you're collecting feedback from the customers and you know, you try to assess, like, you know, give a rating to, you know, what, what the experience was like. And, and really it's all about making software more human and making those experiences great. You know, as our company, like, we often hear this, you know in our ethos is, you know, how can we turn, you know, customers into ambassadors and, and brands into religion? So that's the core of where we are at Qualtrics, myself particularly, I work in the access control space and also work on several technologies catered specifically to enterprises.

Carlos Ponce (03:30):

Thank you again Prithvi. So, okay, now let's move on to the topic of today's conversation. So the topic as, as chosen by you, is scalable enterprise features. So we're going to be discussing empowering big brands with innovative solutions. So tell us why did you choose this particular topic and why did you feel it was relevant for today's day and age?

Prithvi Dhelia (03:57):

Yes, absolutely. You know, when we talk about scaling, I think scaling is the crux of, you know core of every business so to speak. When you, when you think about what exactly is scaling the, it's the ability for you to be able to, you know, handle large volumes of, you know, customer interactions, whether it's online, offline, and just being able to, you know, do things at scale where your costs are not growing proportionally to the increase in customers. So as to, you know, cause a greater impact with fewer resources or, you know, to increase, so to speak, for the company, like the margins and so on and so forth. So scaling I think is very, very crucial because, you know, it's one of the things that make or break your organization every time you hit that influx point. When you're a small company you make all the strides possible to do, to penetrate the market, and you do custom solutions, you do a lot of handholding. And as soon as you know, you find your groove, you start to see rise in demand, that's when you need to shift gears and, you know, try to simplify things, go back to the whiteboard, and try to scale things much more. And that, that really ends up defining the, you know, your journey through that process really ends up defining you know, how you, how you fare down the road. Why, particularly for enterprises, I think my experience over the past through my entire career has been in the enterprise space. And I think it is meaningful enough to touch upon because it's, it's a little bit different from when you look at the consumer business. When you look at enterprises enterprises you may be building, you know, a story that comes to my mind. So I live in Seattle area, and once I had the opportunity to visit the Boeing facility, and towards the end of, they do a little tour towards the end of the tour, they, you know the guy told us, you know, every single aircraft you see out there that is being built, but not ready to fly is already sold. So that's the, that's the essence of enterprise business. You are oftentimes building things or trying to scale things because of something that you may have already sold or the needs of your existing customers have evolved. And you want to be able to meet that demand. You have to be able to meet that increase without causing any impact to existing clients and ensuring that you have a smooth experience even as you continue to grow larger. So that, that's the, that's the reason you know, that I feel like it's meaningful enough to touch upon the subject. And, you know, you run into interesting challenges as, as you go along. So yeah, feel free to ask any questions that you have.

Carlos Ponce (06:39):

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Well, before I jump into something else, Wade, do you have anything for Prithvi right now?

Wade Erickson (06:48):

Yeah, you know you know, I understand Qualtrics is in the customer feedback space, and I saw a lot of your products are tied to, in the digital journey, whether it's an e-commerce site, and, you know, maybe it's a basket analysis where they're putting things in a basket or they're looking at things but never put it in a basket. And those kind of things are, of course, valuable to understand the, the usability of the site. I'm always intrigued in where the physical world is going in that space. Because Obviously we depend on a lot of surveys, a lot that are sometimes very distant from the time of, between the experience to the time you're filling that in. Do you see any trends in a technology? Or let's say I'm, I just flew on an airplane and I flew from LA to Chicago, and your customer is United Airlines, right? And then I get off the plane. Is there anything that's prompting people to get that feedback, whether it's a text message or a Bluetooth messaging or something that prompts that person to say, Hey, you know, how was your experience? You know, so that when they sit down they can, and maybe they had a bad situation or maybe a great situation. Do you see any trends like that in your space of feedback and customer experience?

Prithvi Dhelia (08:06):

Yes, absolutely. So, you know, you hit, you know, this is a great question. And especially, you know, as more and more businesses go online, in some ways it's also harder to establish you know, for an e-commerce website, for instance, I own you know on, on the side, I have my own eCommerce business. And, you know, when the sales are going up or going down, you don't necessarily see an indication to what may have changed. It could be that the online algorithms have changed or so on and so forth. And it's very unlike having a physical retail store where someone walks into your store and you can look at their face and try to gather the emotion, or, you know, have a conversation with them, stop and ask them, or something like that. Or put up a big banner of, you know, Hey, there's a big sale going on. But if someone's not even going to come to your website, how do you even display that? Speaking in terms of like an example in the digital space of what companies are trying to do is try to collect as much feedback like you would in a physical setting, but without causing a lot of user intervention. So, you know, oftentimes you'd see towards the end of your journey that, you know, how is your flight and everything like that. But if your airline taxi in time and everything like that, you are ready to go. You may not even look at your screen wanting to fill that out. So how can you do that through the transaction? So one of the examples, one of the examples is I think imagine that you're going to a Starbucks and, you know, every time you go to a Starbucks, you know, maybe there is an app. We try to collect rating and make it as easy as possible, like a touch about it, like maybe just a thumbs up or thumbs down without having to write too much. And and, you know, mine that data. So you keep gathering that data and maybe that, you know, you went to a different location. For instance, you've been going to a one in Chicago, but now you choose that, you know, you want to go one in Michigan, and all of a sudden you end up getting a, you know, lower, you're giving a lower rating, and all of that data can be mined and cross-referenced between locations and, you know, maybe there is something else going on. Maybe you try to also pair it, you know, where Qualtrics really tries to stand out. And the whole experience management is also tries to combine the effect of customer experience along with employee experience. So maybe there is also employees at that particular location who've been complaining about being short on supplies or being short on resources, and that is correlating with the fact that you had a, you know, less than optimal experience when you went to the Michigan store. So those are, those are some of the things that, you know also feedback in terms of not just always directly asking the customer, but check, you know, analyzing the speed. Let's say you have a, you're a store there is a speed score that you calculate how quickly you can go in and check out and also how much information is available, how much time people are spending on each page. So I think it's the whole ecosystem of trying to line up all of those factors because oftentimes it's, it's very hard to pinpoint one particular factor, but when you look at the whole picture, you try to get an idea of, you know, where things are headed.

Wade Erickson (11:12):

Great. On the, you know, given the topic, we're talking about scalable enterprise features and you know that really drives product development, obviously, as you're adding features and you're evaluating those experiences, not only is your product built for customer experiences, but you have to, you have to do that yourself and your own features for your application, obviously. Tell me a little bit about how this world of big data and AI is driving some of the feature thought about your applications and, and what practices around product development would you say that have been novel and interesting where you've been.

Prithvi Dhelia (12:00):

Yes, absolutely. So I can speak on behalf of Qualtrics and also like the value proposition of why customers are drawn to Qualtrics. You know, you may have seen the traditional ways of development where you go to the whiteboard, you, there's a problem that, you know, a group of people come together and they try to give a best shot come up with an MVP, ship it out of the door, and then collect feedback and then iterate on it. I think the world is evolving and getting trying to, you know, get ahead of the curve is can we do that process? Instead of doing that after, can, can we pre-one that, can we do that before and try and collect meaningful data to tell us what we should be going towards next? So for example you know, when, when you integrate experience or, you know, gathering feedback we also have a product line of product experience. So I'll give you an example of what product experience would look like. It's, it's, it's specifically meant for companies developing, doing product development, but it's not maybe ready to the market yet. So, for example, you look at the Pfizer vaccine you know, it's going through clinical trials. It's you know, it's being tested upon in the real world, and the customers are being prompted you know, through their preferred way of communication, making it as easy of what they're feeling, maybe after an hour, after two hours, after a day, what needs to change and taking that into account as you are shaping the product, as opposed to you try to, you know, get quickly to the market, fail fast, and collect feedback, and then go on and so forth. So when, when you look at it you know, it really depends in the healthcare industry, this can have make huge strides because the time to market is much longer. You don't really have a mechanism that you can just go in and fail fast. You want to get it right and you want to get it out there safely. So those are some of the things that are being shaped is try and stay ahead of the curve, know what the customer really wants, and integrate that into your pipeline into your continuous delivery pipeline, as opposed to getting something out there and then going back to the whiteboard, tweaking things.

Wade Erickson (14:11):

Great. go ahead, Carlos, if you have a question.

Carlos Ponce (14:16):

Yes. Wade thank you. Okay. So well, we're, one of the things that we're discussing today is innovative solutions, right? So but we're also mainly about enterprise, but in terms of the, the customer front lines, let's call it that, right? So how, what sort of innovation initiatives are currently in place, or in the front burner or in the middle burner, that are going to allow or diminish or even dis make disappear any kind of friction, you know in order with with customer service teams and all that. So how is this going to, what's, what's going on in terms of innovation that, that are, that is going to make frictions go away?

Prithvi Dhelia (15:06):

I think you know, as, as we've all seen like the big trend towards, you know finding the applicability of gen ai I think that's one of the streams for sure is how do you, you know, when if you go back, you know, a few decades, you know, everything was based on human interaction. And then from there on, you try to move towards software, and you're trying to automate things and standardize things. And as you try want to scale, you tend to simplify, right? You're trying to give that standard experience, but at a really high scale. But somewhere through that process, the personalized touch may get lost, or that human intervention that that dialogue that you have may get lost through, through the power of something like gen AI. What, you know, what a lot of companies across the board are trying to go towards is, can we make this conversational as opposed to, you know, giving you a visit of, you go, you go in, you follow this big laundry list of items to set something up like a dashboard or a survey. Can we make it conversational based on, you know, there's something going on, you're, you, you know, you're feeling data, you have an event coming up, And you led through conversations, you're able to manage some of those experiences, like, okay, maybe you want to spin up a survey, maybe you want to collect feedback, so make it as human as possible. I think that companies were able to do that will definitely make a huge stride doing things at scale, but at the same time, trying to bring back a little bit of that touch of conversation so that you can sense better before, before things happen. So I think that's, that's one of the biggest things. To give you a more specific example, again, as I said, like you know, you, you have an event. You're, you know, you have a conversational ai and, you know, as things go wrong, the AI is also able to detect anomalies, you know, based on your conversation, based on natural language processing. It's able to tell whether or not, you know how your emotions are lining up. And that way it can give, offer you better suggestions because, you know, it's, it's a whole journey. You mine data you try to make decisions from that data, and you may not get everything right, and that's okay, but as long as that feedback is now being put into, back into the pipeline, and then you're cross-referencing across, you know other areas, that's what, what's going to make a real difference. I can also speak about, you know, how it's unlocking as you said, for customer experience. You know, it takes the traditional way, or at least what it is right now for large companies, is that, you know, you identify the issue, there are certain steps you follow for troubleshooting, and then you try to get on a conversation, on a call with, with the human rep and, you know, report it or so on, or file a ticket. But now that process can be automated, you know, you're in a conversation with the bot and they're able to mine this data. They're able to analyze the data, and they're able to detect and collect feedback on your behalf as well through the part of that conversation. So that's in the customer space, also in the employee space, because employee experience employee surveys is also another big tool that we sell to enterprises is that are there other means to identify you know, you may not be so keen on submitting feedback and putting in data every, every month or every couple of months, because not a lot may have changed about your job. So what you do is, are there indicators is there data that you can use based on the conversations that you're having, based on, you know, the energy levels, are there things that can be used automatically to detect what your sentiment is like, and be able to predict how long you may want to work at the company? So those are some of the things, they're super early but you know, obviously a lot depends on, you know, the privacy and security concerns of not just of customers, of employees, of how you can use that data. So I think that is another very, very essential topic, because there's a lot you can do with it. But you also want to be mindful of, you know, the ethical core of conduct and what you're collecting, because at the end of the day you're just the custodian of the data, but it is, you have to realize it's still owned by the enterprise and ultimately the frontline user.

Carlos Ponce (19:22):

Great, great, great. Thank you so much. Wade back to you, please.

Wade Erickson (19:26):

Yeah. so I wanted to pivot a little bit away from the company and just talking about you a little bit. I noticed in your background you're an army reservist, so of course, thank you for your service to the military in the US. I come across a lot of folks in the military that are looking to get into tech, and you know, I have, although I've worked as a civilian in the DOD for many years, 13, 14 years as a civilian throughout my career. And so I have a perspective from that side. I've never really been enlisted. And so can you tell me a little bit about how the military supported you and shaped your technical career and what you were able to leverage in your time in the military for some of those folks that are either in the military, military, or just kind of coming out the military?

Prithvi Dhelia (20:22):

Yeah. You know again, leading back, leading back to a topic, I think my biggest takeaway was you know being a part of an organization that is, that is huge you know, the processes that are, you know in place, a lot of them are still relevant of, you know, being able to move masses and, you know, the, the impact that you want to be able to create. So one of my biggest takeaways was from the military, was just the power that collaboration can unlock. You know, you and, and, and the power of efficiency. So when, when you try to do things at scale that's really what it boils down to. You know, you can throw a hundred people in a room without any sort of efficiency and get nothing done, but at the same time, you can, you know, if you have the right processes in place you can churn great results just within a couple of minutes. So that's been my biggest takeaway. The military, of course, I'm very grateful. It's been very supportive and fortunate you know in my, in my, in my education as well. So I enrolled at the time, you know, I was pursuing my major at Purdue. And then, you know it, it allowed me to, you know think, think beyond and bringing some of those aspects of, let's say, discipline and those kind of things back into and at the time, I remember when I was in the Army I, I just finished my term, but when I was in the Army, I was working on the SAP portal that they were trying to, they were trying to roll out. And you know, one of the things that I remember is I was very excited to finally, you know, being work, working in the back end of things. So my job was to basically, you know, use their portal and manage supplies and those kind of things, and also being able to write code. So that was one of the, you know, first times that I was doing it at a very you know, big platform. And I realized, someone told me, you know, you're going to be working on the latest system. And I looked at that system, and that system was at best, 15 years old. And the, so my biggest learning over there that came about is, it's one thing to get something out there, but it's another thing to drive adoption. And the more you think about it it goes back to, you know, some of the things that we touch upon, security and compliance as you tend to scale, you have to be very, very mindful of are you handling data the right way? Do you have the right security measures in place because you're trying to grow fast be out there, have the competitive edge, but you need to ensure that the things are safe, and you have the security measures in place. And that's one of the reasons where you see large organizations, you look at healthcare, you look at military technology, still not, you know, broken in that deeply to unlock like the great potential just because of, we haven't you know, answered every single question to how to keep the data safe. And that's, that, that was the pivotal concern. So you're not going to find cutting edge technology. You're going to find some things written back in the day, 15, 20 years old. But it works. And, and it, that gives you something that you want to build systems. And when you're selling to enterprises, you don't want to just do things quickly. You want to build systems that they're going to bank upon for decades. So that's, and keep innovating at the same time. So you need to have a delivery pipeline where you can shift things quicker, but that doesn't mean that, you know, you're going to be changing a lot at the same time.

Carlos Ponce (23:58):

Excellent. Great. Thank you so much Prithvi Dhelia we we're coming up on time, so unfortunately, you know, time flies when you're, when you're having fun. So you know, I want to thank you before anything else. I want to thank you for having been with us on the show today, and I'm sure that viewers are going to find a lot of your insights about what you shared about Qualtrics. And I'm sure there's going to be quite a few of our viewers are going to be interested in how to stop customer issues from, from becoming lost revenue, right? So that being said the next thing for me is thank you, but don't go. Please stay with us as we go off the air. I have a quick announcement to make, and that is next week we're going to be speaking with our, our next guest is going to be Charles Payne, the CTO, CSIO of Neptune Media. And the topic is going to be securing tomorrow, today, exploring cybersecurity cutting edge. So that's what we're going to be having featuring next week right here on Tech Leaders Unplug as ever at 9:30 PM Pacific on November the sixth. And with this being said, again, thank you Prithvi. Thank you, Wade. Sure. See you next time right here on Tech Leaders Unplugged