Yonyx: Troubleshooting Now Available on the Cloud!

Thursday August 02, 2012 , 5 min Read

Over the last two decades, the Internet made all of us publishers of information - be it through email, websites or blogs. This led to an explosion of information and a wave of innovation with companies connecting us to information "relevant" to us. **Ebay** did this by providing information about people buying and selling items, **Google**, by searching through millions of websites - while **Facebook** connected us with information about happenings in our friends' lives.

Yet there is a large class of information that is still delivered through one on one interactions between "experts" and their customers. Customer Support Agents in call centers worldwide, Tutors, Doctors, Counselors, & Telemarketers - all provide information to their customers through one on one interactions even though the information may be repetitive in nature.

"How can an expert engage with millions of people, one on one, simultaneously?" Inspired by this problem, Yonyx has built a cloud based platform that addresses this very unique market opportunity using proprietary graph database technology.

Looking specifically into the customer support, the interaction between an agent and a customer is similar to one between a patient and a doctor. A patient starts by telling the doctor the symptoms he is suffering from – e.g. Cough. The Doctor now interacts with the patient (might potentially order a couple of tests along the way) and concludes that the underlying problem the patient is suffering from is a simple Flu or something more involved! Similarly when a customer calls a computer company for customer support – he/she starts by talking about the symptoms they are facing, like display or networking issues. An agent now interacts with the customer to deduce the underlying problem causing the symptom, and suggest an appropriate remedy.

The Yonyx platform helps subject matter experts express their knowledge in the form of multimedia flowcharts on the web. Customers can traverse these flowcharts starting from problem symptoms they experience one step at a time along a pathway specific to the underlying problem and arrive at its corresponding solution. Their customers are Enterprises - large and small - that offer product support to their customers either via in-house or outsourced call centers.

Yonyx’s value proposition multi-fold:

Cut cost of delivering support by 90%
Improve consistency & quality of support delivered
Scalable solution that doesn’t require growth in staff proportional to growth in customers handled
24x7 solutions for customers
Analytics provide insights into Customer behavior and product issues

Sanjay Bajaj is a co-founder and CEO of Yonyx. An entrepreneur at heart, he is a Silicon Valley veteran with nearly 25 years of experience in various technology firms including NeXT, Synopsys, Rolm, and multiple startups including Vianeta, interHDL & Silicon Architects which led to successful exits. Sanjay focuses on product, sales, investment & team building. Sanjay holds an MSEE degree from Caltech and a B.Tech degree in Electronics & Electrical Communications Engineering (ECE) from IIT Kharagpur.

Nixon Michaelangelo a co-founder and CTO of Yonyx, is a product architect, product manager, developer, & an artist rolled into one. Nixon has 15 years of rich technology experience building scalable products in Telecom, Video & Document Management industries. He also has received a US patent in Document Management industry. Nixon is a PMP and holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Application.

“Having lived in the Bay area for a long time, startups and entrepreneurism was not alien to me. In fact, I had a chance to work with Steve Jobs during the four years I was at NeXT. So when we decided to move back to India – having worked for product companies all my career, the prospect of working for a services company didn’t entice me. Nixon and I were toying with a few ideas and decided to take the plunge when IIT Delhi offered us some incubation space… the rest has been a journey of discovery, adventure, twists & turns…” says Sanjay.

Over 2.3 Million people are employed providing customer support in the US alone, according to US Dept of Labor Statistics. Companies spend north of $100B a year in this function. The Yonyx team

is seeing very positive feedback for their platform from prospective customers they are engaged with. Most of their customers are Enterprises based in the US – as Internet is far more penetrated as percentage of population there.

They license their platform for Enterprises to create as many Yonices (multimedia flowcharts) as they like for a low monthly fee. Their main source of revenue is an Incident fee (i.e. fee for each Customer of the Client, helping himself through Yonyx). This Incident fee is a small fraction of the cost the Client would have incurred in helping the customers through live agents in their call centers.

“Our biggest challenge is communicating our solution to customers. We need a quick 15 second elevator pitch about our product that customers can relate with. When we get customers in a room or web meeting – and walk them through our product with a presentation & demo – we get the wows, and a very high percentage of meetings result in customer wanting to move forwards, but they don’t know what to expect before agreeing to the meeting!” says Nixon.

Another challenge that Yonyx is experiencing is finding talent. The culture in India is that we are more comfortable working for bigger branded companies. Yonyx offers engineers a chance to do real engineering. They respect hackers and folks who dare to think differently & independently but finding such talent is another challenge.

Try the services offered by Yonyx. Also, if you are facing recruitment troubles, visit the YourStory Job Board that offers great hiring solutions for startups!

Yonyx recently won the IBM Smart Camp in India.

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