After more than one bad experience with customer support, upwards of 80% of customers say they would start doing business with a competitor. With so much of an organization's success hinging on whether or not their customers are getting the right support, business leaders are tasked with the challenge of bolstering support resources enough with creating an operational time suck. Throughout Rahul Asati's career, he began to notice the issues that customer support teams were facing, and he noticed that these teams were regularly expected to work with tedious, broken systems that made their jobs more difficult than they needed to be.

Rahul Asati
Rahul Asati Rahul Asati

As a software architect at Zenefits, Rahul was tasked with building an all-in-one HR software solution that enveloped the requirements of payroll, benefits, and more. The platform offered by Zenefits helped break down walls within different organizations, allowing multiple verticals – finance and HR – and their respective data sets to work together, share data, and react to changes with ease. Zenefits even made life easier for end users by enabling easy-to-fill-out forms that worked across a number of different insurance providers.

While he was busy building a revolutionary platform for Zenefits customers, Rahul noticed another problem starting to creep up: customer support was getting more difficult to maintain as the business grew. In just two years, Zenefits went from being valued at $15 million to $2 billion, which is almost unheard of in the world of entrepreneurship. To keep up as the organization scaled, the leadership team at Zenefits had to revamp how customer support tickets were dealt with.

Simple observations clued Rahul into the fact that when a customer support agent was working to resolve a ticket, they would have to open up 5 or more different windows to get all the necessary information needed to resolve the issue and close the ticket. Processing over 16,000 of these tickets a month meant that the customer support team quite literally did not have time to be opening up multiple tabs and navigating inefficiencies if Zenefits was going to keep its customers happy. During that time, customer support spend was 35% of the overall revenues and the function desperately needed a new path forward.

Rahul was entrusted by Zenefit's CTO to tackle this growing problem, and within 8 months, his team was able to reduce customer support tickets by 60%. They enabled technological tools to help streamline the process, but they also focused on addressing root problems that were causing customers to reach out in the first place. Massive savings – in both time and money – were waiting on the other side of this accomplishment, but the biggest reward was increased happiness both internally on the customer service side and externally with customers.

The challenges customer support teams faced continued to show up in new roles and organizations that Rahul was a part of, so, eventually, he decided to start his own company and do something about it. Within the last year, Rahul found his co-founder, Jon O'Bryan, and together, the pair started Atlas, a customer support platform that makes it possible for support agents to respond faster and solve problems with ease.

Atlas brings together customer application usage data and customer communications in a single platform, making the support process seamless for customers and agents alike. Atlas easily scales as businesses grow, making it the perfect solution for startups and well-established companies. Building software solutions in different industries has been the focus of Rahul's career, but now, he gets to create software solutions that work in any industry, further solidifying his reputation as an all-in-one software expert.