Executive Q&A: An Interview with Collaborationroom.AI Founder Sameer Maini

In this episode of Executive Q&A, Erin Kerr interviews Sameer Maini about his new venture, Collaborationroom.ai, and how he’s seeking to change the way call center agents work from home. Watch Erin’s conversation with Sameer, or read it below.

Erin:

Hi everyone. I'm here today with Sameer Maini, the founder of Collaborationroom.AI. And we're going to have a conversation today about how his product has changed the marketplace a little bit, especially when it comes to work from home. So, Sameer, thank you so much for being with me today.

Sameer:

Thank you. And happy to be here and talk about Collaborationroom.AI.

Erin:

Yeah, I'm really excited to hear more about it. So to that end, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Sameer:

Absolutely. So, as you said there I'm the founder of Collaborationroom.AI. I've been in the BPO contact centers space for about 20 years. And, right now I'm based out of Seattle. A little bit more about the product, Collaborationroom.ai is a patent pending application product built for agent engagement, agent productivity, and compliance. And it's specifically for contact centers, BPOs, and collection agencies. It’s basically built to enable the supervisor to manage a team as if they were in a brick and mortar facility. When COVID hit, everybody started working from home. So I felt there was a challenge and, you know, I've always worked in an office or where there has been a call center supervisor next to me, or I've always sat in one of those areas. And I've always felt the relationship that a supervisor has with the agent is pretty unique, how they're interacting, you know, whether it's looking on an account or getting help or working as a part of a team. And to me, working from home seemed like a challenge when you have agents not there and you can't engage with them the same way you were. So we decided to build this product and here we are.

Erin:

Yeah. That's great. And, like you mentioned, most people prior to March of 2020, weren't working from home and it certainly wasn't typical to have call center agents working from home. So there have been other products that have popped up since then, because things have changed a lot, obviously. There have been a lot of innovations to help support and train agents that are working from home. So what differentiates Collaborationroom.ai from the other solutions out there?

Sameer:

Great, great question. And so a Collaborationroom.ai is basically a purpose-built solution for contact centers and unlike other tools that are out there. It's not a video conferencing solution. Yes, there are aspects of video. There are aspects of compliance. As a supervisor, you get to see your agent screen and video in real time. Um, if it’s alright with you, I'd like to share a screen over here and that illustrates what differentiates us from competition, or from other other tools that are out there. So this is me as a supervisor. If this is a team and I'm working with my team, our tool allows a supervisor to basically see if the agent has both screens. For example, [name] is using dual monitors. I get to see a screen one screen two, and as video in real time, same case we have, [name] has two monitors, is sharing a screen.

Not only that, there's a compliance aspect. I see somebody else also in the image and I get a notification as a supervisor that hey, somebody else is also there, who should not be watching the PII information. So it makes us very unique. Unlike other tools where, you know, you're basically looking at everybody's video and watching a presenter, this is a purpose-built tool that provides real time and theoretical feedback on agent engagement, as well as agent enabled compliance. And the results that we are seeing is that agent productivity is high with this tool.

Erin:

Great. Well, thank you for sharing that with me and I can see why that would be really important in an environment where normally your supervisor, it might be like three or four cubicles away from you in this case, they could be, you know, across the state or across the country, even at the rate, things are going. So that's great. And it seems like that is really the piece that differentiates you guys from like a zoom or teams or Google meets or something like that. Is that right?

Sameer:

Yeah. And then, you know, we also have added features, like a one-on-one coaching thing. So while I'm managing my team, if an agent wants to engage in a one-on-one call with me, just like if you're in the call center, right. The agent raises his hand, the supervisor walks over, looks at a screen and says, okay, Erin, I see what you're doing. You know, click here, or this is what you need to do on that account. That is another feature that we have, which other products don't have. So we're basically building this product for contact centers, BPOs and collection agencies. This is basically, you know, purposeful product to replicate the workflow that you had while you were in a brick and mortar facility.

Erin:

It seems pretty cool. And you had mentioned when you were showing us the screenshot that there's sort of built in, controls around privacy. So if somebody walks up behind me right now, and you were my supervisor, you'd get a notification that, hey, someone's looking over Erin’s shoulder.  There are obviously privacy concerns when agents are working from home, both with protecting consumer information and agents’ home privacy, right? Like I might not want you to see my refrigerator or something like that. So how does your solution approach those types of privacy concerns? 

Sameer:

Yeah. Great question. So for agent privacy, you know, we have enabled background blurring. So an agent, if they decide and, you know, in the screenshot, like who had his background blurred. So if somebody walked behind him, I'll see that somebody is behind them, but I wouldn't be able to see what kind of refrigerator he had. So there's background blurring that we have enabled as a part of the roadmap. We're also doing custom backgrounds. So those things are there that we are building. Background blurring is in production right now, and agents are using it so they can blur the background. So it's, you know, nobody can see your couch, your refrigerator, or what's in the background.

Erin:

Yeah. And the reason I said refrigerator out of all things is maybe some people hang their bills on the refrigerator. Like ,I don't want them to see my dental bill or something like that.

Sameer:

Those things are there.  Background blurring is obviously there, right? The other thing is we're not recording video or screen. This is a real-time tool. It's just like your supervisor is there and you're interacting with him as if you were working in the call center. Right. So we're not recording all your activities. This is not big brother at all. This is agent engagement for us, very unique for us.  It's not like somebody can go back and say, okay  let me go and look at what Erin was doing at that point in time. Yes, we have metadata, but it's not like we're recording all your video and audio screens to address some of the privacy concerns that you mentioned.

Erin:

Right. That's great. Along those same lines, if I was an agent working from home, I might feel like that's a little bit of an encroachment on my privacy, even though if I'm in the office, obviously there are cameras and supervisors. So how have agents responded to your solution so far? 

Sameer:

Great question. That was one of the concerns I had when we built the product, how will agents take having a camera, being where they work. And the response has been very positive. Part of it is the generation that we have right now, right. Who would have thought if you asked me 20 years ago that I'm going to make videos of myself doing something silly, putting them on the internet, and it's going to be a big corporation. Tik-Tok probably wouldn't want to talk about that. Right. But people have become more comfortable with video.  I've, even when my gray hair is feeling, more open to turning the camera on and having the dog come in and you know, what have you, so agents are liking that.

Plus the other thing is when you're working from home and you're a call center agent, and this is why this is an agent engagement tool, and not a big brother monitoring tool. You don't want to be on an island, just taking phone calls. You want to feel as if you're a part of our team. So you're getting to interact with your supervisor on a one-on-one basis. Right. You're seeing them. It's not like somebody is basically monitoring everything that's going on in your house. This is you working with your supervisor, establishing that one-on-one rapport and building the team environment.

Erin:

And that's so important, especially in a job like being a call center agent, where it can be really, really demanding and can be a little bit taxing. So that's awesome. It's great that they're having a good experience so far. You you talked a little bit about this when we were talking about the agent privacy, but what else is on your roadmap?

Sameer:

Our philosophy is, if you may say, that we're going to build the roadmap with our customers. Our customers are telling us features and they're telling us what they would like to see. So a couple of things that are on our immediate roadmap are what we call the buddy system. So you have a senior agent and you have somebody who's a new hire, and we're going to build what we call a buddy system where a supervisor can pair a new hire with a senior agent and the agent can work with a supervisor, just like you were in a call center, right? The new hire comes in, sits behind a senior agent, maybe has a voice splitter going on where he's listening into the call and also seeing what the agent is doing.

So we're building that out. We're also building out right now, a supervisor collaboration room and another hierarchy level where a manager will also be able to interact with a supervisor without having to go from one room to another. So we're building some of that out from a tech perspective. Obviously, you know, it's AI, it's obviously continuous evolution of the models and continuously making them better. We're enabling object detection with the ability to detect cell phones, which is in beta right now. But there are other things that our customers have said that they would like to see that we are adding to the product. Again, you know, we're getting all this metadata, which I think is very useful. So we measure agent engagement. How does it translate into production?

So building our APIs that allow the customer to extract this agent engagement data and marry it with their collection platform, CRM platform, to see what the relationship is. Can you predict that Erin is a happy agent and they’ll be there with you longer. Sameer was not engaged, maybe a little disgruntled. And can you predict attrition? Can you predict production? So we're building those APIs out to give our customers the ability to take this data and marry it with the production data, with their CRM data, and drive their business using the data that we're getting. So those are the things on the roadmap for us.

Erin:

Wow. So it sounds like it's really sort of an all-in-one agent training tool and it, you know, in the future it could really alleviate or stop companies from having to pull agents in at all. People can work from anywhere.

Sameer:

Yeah. I think that's the vision that we have is we feel work from home is here to stay. We feel you know, the industry has changed. We feel people are getting used to it. I personally work from home now and I haven't been in an office in two years. So I think, it's basically enabling the supervisors to engage with their teams, allowing businesses to recruit anywhere. Right. I remember in the BPO space, if you had to open a call center, you would do a big survey, figure out where real estate is cheap, where you can go hire people, where the talent is available. And you have to put in a big infrastructure before you could even make one new hire.You've got to build a call center, port facilities, all that stuff, circuits. I think the world has become flat. Now, if you may say, and allowing businesses to basically recruit, hire, and, you know, in areas where they don't have offices. So that's the vision we have of enabling the business to do so.

Erin:

That's great. Those are really all the questions I have for you today about Collaborationroom.ai. Do you have any final thoughts?

Sameer:

Well, we're excited for this journey. We are a young company. You know, we're excited to partner with our clients and we’re excited to build this product and enable them to go back and do what they were doing pre-COVID but do it while agents are working from home. So thank you.

Erin:

Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today, Sameer. It's been great to learn more about Collaborationroom.ai, which is a very unique product and not one that I've heard of before. Like  you said, it's patent pending. So that's amazing. Thanks again for joining us today. And I'm sure I will talk to you soon.

Sameer:

Thank you

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