[SaaS Series] Transforming Customer Experience With Rishi Rana

Rishi Rana is the CEO of Cyara, a global leader in AI-powered customer experience assurance, helping top brands deliver seamless interactions across voice, digital, and AI channels. Under his leadership, Cyara has expanded testing to 135+ countries, partnered with 330+ carriers, won the 2024 Silver Stevie Award for CX Transformation, and serves clients like Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, and Walmart. With 25+ years in enterprise SaaS — including over a decade at Microsoft — Rishi is passionate about using technology to enhance customer journeys and operational efficiency, with expertise in omnichannel assurance and generative AI.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:11] Rishi Rana explains Cyara’s mission to optimize every customer interaction
[5:35] How enterprises use Cyara to automate workflows and ensure consistency
[8:56] Common customer experience challenges like hold times and repeated verifications
[12:51] Mistakes companies make by reusing old processes and ignoring personas
[15:19] Impact of AI with deterministic, agentic, and hybrid models
[19:18] Why Cyara’s deployment takes just three weeks
[26:24] Transitioning from founders to professional CEO leadership

In this episode…

Customer experience can make or break a brand, but delivering seamless interactions across every channel is easier said than done. How can companies ensure their customers always receive fast, accurate, and consistent service, no matter how they reach out?

According to Rishi Rana, a seasoned SaaS leader with over 25 years of experience, the key lies in testing, monitoring, and continuously optimizing every customer interaction. He highlights the importance of understanding customer intent, reducing friction, and automating processes to reach where humans cannot. By leveraging AI and advanced testing tools, businesses can ensure omnichannel consistency, prevent failures before they happen, and create experiences that truly retain customers. This approach transforms not only operational efficiency but also customer trust and loyalty.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Rishi Rana, CEO of Cyara, to talk about transforming customer experience with AI-powered solutions. They discuss automating contact center workflows, ensuring seamless omnichannel interactions, and leveraging generative AI for smarter service. He also shares his insights on enterprise implementation strategies and lessons from leading global teams.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related episode:

Quotable moments:

“Our North Star is to make sure that in every interaction we eliminate all bad customer interaction.”
“Just because it was done that way does not mean it will take us to the next level.”
“Understanding the intent and objective of the customer in the least number of steps is critical.”
“Until you’re on planet Earth, you will never be happy; you can always be in pursuit of happiness.”

Action steps:

Review and refine processes: Regularly audit your customer experience to stay relevant and efficient as expectations evolve.
Test across channels: Evaluate journeys on every platform before launch to guarantee consistent, seamless experiences.
Use AI and automation: Monitor interactions and automate repetitive tasks so human agents can focus on more complex issues.
Personalize for your audience: Tailor experiences to different customer personas and needs for maximum impact.
Lead decisively: Embrace change and make informed decisions quickly to drive innovation and growth.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Rishi Rana of Cyara and you can check him out at Cyara.com and it’s all customer experience all the time and we’re going to really dig into customer experience. I think this is applicable for all businesses. Rishi. And before we launch into it and I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of our SaaS Series, our software founder and leader series. Some interesting ones to check out. In the past, we had one of the co-founders of Pipedrive. That was a really interesting episode. One of the co-founders of Zapier was a cool episode. Mailshake was a very interesting episode and how they’re acquiring companies. Also one of the founding engineers at Mobileye. That was some interesting stories on how they were acquired eventually by Intel for $15.3 billion. And that was a cool story.

But it wasn’t always like that. There were ups and downs, even though it seems like things are always sunshine and rainbows. That was not the case. And so check all those episodes out and more on InspiredInsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production. I’ve been podcasting at this point in time for over 16 years and would never stop doing it because I love it. And number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s corporate gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind of their clients, partners, prospects, even staff. From a culture perspective, simple, easy, and actually affordable.

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I am excited to introduce Rishi Rana. He’s the CEO of Cyara, the global leader in AI powered customer experience, assurance and productivity. You know, you can see on their websites they turn every interaction into a reason why customers stay really over. He’s over 25 years of experience leading enterprise SaaS innovation, and he’s driving CRS mission to help the world’s largest brands. And they do have a lot of the world’s largest brands. We talk about Microsoft, Salesforce, some, you know, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California, IBM, Amazon, Lex. You know, there’s so many here that it’s really they help them deliver flawless trusted customer experiences. And this is across voice digital and AI channels. And previously he’s been you know I can’t even list the number of companies you’ve helped as leadership. And also you spent 12 years plus at Microsoft as well. So Rishi, thanks for joining me.

Rishi Rana: 03:57

Thank you. Thank you for the warm introduction and the and the lovely words that you threw at me. But yeah. Hey, thank you again for everything.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:05

Let’s start with Cyara and what you do. I’m going to pull up the website so people can check it out.

Rishi Rana: 04:11

All right look what what Cyara does like what I do is I’m the I’m the CEO for Cyara driving it to its destination that we call the North Star or North Star is to make sure that every interaction we eliminate all bad customer interaction. Now with that, that’s it’s simply put. But what we need to have, we need to provide is a seamless experience across all channels, across all set of contact centers. We are an agnostic platform that sit on top of any and all contact centers across the globe and across all channels of communication. So omnichannel and making sure that it is fully enabled. Tested and it is monitored as well. So it’s a continuous loop. We are testing it. You’re deploying it in production. You’re monitoring it. You’re bringing it back. And it’s a complete DevOps cycle. To be providing across a product or platform contains those 11 different products that help in in a nutshell, what I explained.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:21

Talk about how it works a little bit so it gives people an idea. Maybe I don’t know if TD Bank would be the best example, because I know it’s like a lot of customer facing. How do how does a company like TD Bank use Cyara?

Rishi Rana: 05:35

Yeah. Look I think there are there are we are a horizontal. So there are plenty of verticals that we help we help in retail. We help with healthcare. There are a lot of healthcare customers, again, very large names that are our customers and and certainly banks as well with Bank of America and Citibank and others. So TD Bank, I think look. Basically, if you think about it all the way, you have workflows that you need to create in order to attend to your customer needs. It could be as simple as I forgot in TD Mac my password and I need to reset it, or I need to check what my account balance is. I need to take care of few transactions. If you’re transacting from that bank and moving your money or assets from one to the other.

So it could be plethora of those customer use cases and scenarios. But when you come in through your whether you come in through a voice bot or a chatbot or you come in through your iPad, you just picking up the phone and calling, you’re going through the browser aspects of it. That experience needs to be seamless. It is humanly impossible to test and verify all those scenarios across the board and that can happen across with with Succinctness. But at the same time making sure that it is it is it is arriving at the same, same answer. It doesn’t matter which channel. So what we do is we help reduce the the amount of tests that need to be generated by auto generate those test cases for you.

We have a designer where you can continue to create and it’s a low code, no code designer where you can drag and drop and create as many test cases. In addition to that, we look at all the call flows that are there, and we generate what got changed because things can continuously change in the business as well. You know, you’re launching a new credit card, you’re launching a new offering. You want your customers to be aware of it, but when they come in, you want to make sure that that’s the best example. In the case of TD Bank, they go through 350,000 calls sometime in the span of between 12 to 16 months.

How do you take that amount of calls and make sure that it is actually getting routed correctly? It is. It is getting attended to correctly, whether in today’s day and world, by an AI agent or by a human agent. How do you make sure that all of that gets resolved? So. So we take care of it end to end, making sure that the journey is seamless. And we are then monitoring it in the monitoring we can find out proactively what things are failing. Bring it back. Making sure that we can relaunch that service, that aspect of the business process.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:36

What are the issues people are having, Rishi of why they come to you? Like, let’s take TD Bank for example. Are they be like, hey, like these people are on hold forever or it’s the calls are dropping. Like, what are you experiencing from the customer side of why they’re switching and using your solution for them themselves?

Rishi Rana: 08:56

Well, look, I think if you launch anything, you want to make sure that your customers get attended to. There is not a customer. There is not a I mean, again, working at Microsoft or working at Sierra, for me, I think look, I think number one, we all create products that provide solutions, solutions that are addressing customers needs. But so towards the end of the day, it’s the customer’s needs. And if those solutions are not, solving the customer needs is when the customer is reaching back to the business and saying, hey, I want x, y, z, I want to make sure the last thing you want over there is for the customer to wait in the line. Waiting in the line used to happen in the 1940s and 50s.

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