When Rahul Asati set out to start Atlas, a company that provides customer support solutions to a wide range of businesses, he turned to his years of experience designing other intricate software solutions for large, complex business challenges. In the earlier years of his career, Rahul worked as a leading engineer at Zenefits and Glide. Zenefits provided benefits support to companies and their employees while Glide supported real estate professionals. Though the two were very different organizations with very different missions, they both had to address gaps in how they served their customers, and Rahul was at the forefront of those endeavors.
Although customer support wasn't always the main focal point in Rahul's career as a software engineer and talented solutions architect, it was a problem he saw come up again and again, regardless of the industry or setting he was working in. Eventually, he found a co-founder and started Atlas. Now, his entire focus is customer support and how to change the ways in which businesses interact with and serve their customers. Striving to remain a thought leader in applying technical solutions to customer support situations, Rahul has become an expert in the customer support landscape. He knows first-hand just how much technology has changed customer support capabilities over the years, and there is no secret that it will continue to evolve as time goes on.
A number of years ago, large brands began offering chatbot services to their customers. Customers could go to a specific platform, open up a conversation with a "virtual agent" and get their questions answered or at least get some idea about where to start resolving their specific issue. However, these chatbots quickly became notorious for talking in circles, offering half-answers, and not really satisfying customer support needs. They relied on complex neural networks to produce answers and often got stuck if customers asked a question they weren't programmed to handle.
Now, with artificial intelligence, chatbots are entering a new generation. They are sophisticated, using machine learning and natural language processing to solve problems and interact with customers in the same ways a human agent would. Taking things a step further, Rahul noted the prominence of Generative AI in the customer support field. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new things based on patterns it learns from the data sets it can access.
Atlas uses cutting edge AI to enable agents to more quickly understand their customers and their context and to respond better. They do this by utilizing comprehensive customer data to summarize a customer's entire experience with an app as well as the customer's conversations with a company. Additionally, Atlas's unique customer data enables them to make suggested actions to agents: suggested responses for how to answer customer questions, suggested tags for how to organize tickets for better holistic understanding of problems, and suggested articles for topics that haven't been addressed sufficiently well by existing help center articles.
Rahul Asati has made a career out of designing complex software solutions, but Atlas goes above and beyond anything he's produced before. This is impressive, considering he helped build an entire real estate marketplace for Glide and a number of HR product offerings while he was working for Zenefits. Atlas, after just one year of operations, has a successful beta product on the market that is being used by hundreds of people daily.
Unlike large competitors that operate in the customer support space, Atlas is making the most out of data and technology, connecting customer support with the rest of the organization. If a customer complains about a product feature or a missing capability, existing solutions don't pass that information on to product teams. With Atlas, the customer support data goes directly to R&D, making root-cause solutions possible and easy instead of offering quick-fix Band-Aids. In order to provide the best customer experience, businesses need to employ the best technological solutions, and in this case, Atlas towers over the rest.
