Interview with Varsha Neelesh

1. Can you tell us a bit about Syncari?

Founded in 2019, Syncari set out to deliver a single platform to manage, unify, govern, and analyze data, enabling businesses to operate on actionable insights without the heavy investment of time and resources. Since then, we’ve transformed trillions of records, empowering over 6,000 users to seamlessly manage their data. Our customers value our modern, low-code, yet highly flexible visual interface, which lets them quickly build and adapt their business processes to meet their evolving needs.

2. Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I hold a degree in computer science and have nearly 20 years of professional experience. My entire career has been within the data and marketing domains. Prior to joining Syncari, I was with Marketo for an extended period, where I integrated leading platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and SAP into Marketo. I also led the analytics team at Marketo.

3. What challenges do you hope to tackle with GenAI?

Two of the biggest challenges we faced are being able to scale, while helping our customers get instant responses to the questions that they’re looking for.  

As Syncari is a platform, there is a modest learning curve involved. When you’re using the product and building out pipelines, it’s natural that you may encounter areas where you need some additional guidance.

Many questions can be easily answered by a help article, but our Help Center has a lot of data. There’s definitely search, but it’s not an interactive experience. 

Initially, our Customer Success team chatted with customers and answered questions live – but we cannot scale with a five-member team. 

4. How did Botco.ai help you address those challenges?

It was natural for us to bring in a chatbot that can be trained on this huge repository of articles and can answer questions for our customers. 

With chat, you can have interaction and also have the context. As you’re chatting, the chatbot understands what I’m talking about, so I can have a conversation, which is not possible with help articles. 

With Botco coming in, it would give back a lot of time for my support engineer to focus on the real issues that the customers are running into and help solve them. 

5. What results have you achieved since implementing Botco.ai?

We are now live where our Help Center is integrated fully with the chatbot, and customers can ask for a live agent if the chatbot is not able to answer. 

So far, we’ve leveraged AI to look at some of the comments to see if the sentiment is positive or negative. If we detect that the sentiment is negative, one of our Customer Success team members is notified in real time so they can jump on it immediately. This data not only helps with day-to-day interactions, our sales teams can use it to build deeper relationships over the long term.  

All of this type of work that we do behind the scenes impacts NRR, so this is something that we keep a close eye on. 

6. What would you say to those concerned about AI adoption?

If you look at all the traditional models, there is still some concern around accuracy.  

Around eight months ago, when we started this initiative, we also had some concerns and issues around accuracy. But in the last six months, the model has evolved so much that we are hitting almost 99% accuracy at this point, which is amazing, and that’s what we are looking for. At this pace, you’ll only see more and more accurate models that you can rely on 100%. 

Another concern is around automation and job displacement.  

But I see AI as augmenting teams and not replacing teams, and that’s what is happening with us. AI will save us a lot of time and let us focus on work that’s more valuable to the business.  

7. Do you have any future ideas for expanding your use of Botco.ai?

At the moment, no, but once we expose this to our customers and start seeing some reports and analytics around how questions are coming in and what kind of answers are being given, probably at that point we’ll have some insights into what kind of customizations we’ll need. 

We are still in the process of go-live for our product support. Once that’s fully stable and enabled, we’ll definitely love to expand it to sales as well. 

8. When you're not working at Syncari, how do you like to spend your free time?

I spend a lot of time with my family – I have a three-year-old, and I spend a lot of time with him. And I’m a huge cat lover. I have almost three cats…and I say “almost,” because one of them is a stray cat who now lives with us in our backyard. If I have time, I also enjoy traveling.