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'Any adversity can be converted into an opportunity': Animesh Jain

Animesh Jain, Chief Delivery Officer, India And Americas, 24/7. AI talks to NewsX exclusively on its special segment, NewsX India A-List. Jain’s responsibilities include providing strategic vision and business insights to clients and helping them achieve business metrics and consumer engagement at [24]7.ai Inc.

Animesh Jain, Chief Delivery Officer, India And Americas, 24/7. AI talks to NewsX exclusively on its special segment, NewsX India A-List. Jain is responsible for driving and executing the digital transformation of customer interactions at client organizations.

Talking about the idea behind India and Americas 24/7.ai Inc, Jain said “It is an intent-driven customer experience solutions that combine the power of human intelligence and artificial intelligence to provide powerful customer experiences. We are making findings on how artificial intelligence and human intelligence and deep vertical expertise can produce personalized and satisfying customer experiences.”

“Also, a significant Customer Contact Center experience enables us to deliver naturally consistent conversations across all digital, as well as voice channels. Driving greater operational efficiencies,” Jain continued. Started in Bangalore, [24]7.ai, Inc. is a 20-year-old organization headquartered in San Jose, California. “We’ve got our delivery centres in India and Bangalore, Hyderabad and besides that, we have our presence in North America, Central America with technology centres in Bangalore, and San Jose, California US and Canada,” Jain added.

Jain threw some light on the changes during the pandemic in the functionality of the organization that has happened, “I believe that we never panicked, the leadership team just came together seamlessly and created a blueprint to ensure two things. One, no disruption to business at all. And no negative impact on our people. These are the two priorities we wanted to make sure that no jobs are lost and we wanted to maintain continuity in our business, which is our services to our customers.”

“So, there was obviously an acute sense of urgency. And with that sense of urgency, we got our teams together so our top priority was to ensure that jobs are protected. The client business continued as smoothly as possible. The entire movement to work from home was planned like a surgical operation from start to finish. Our first employee actually went live on the same day as the lockdown was announced in India, and within months of that 85% of our workforce were actually working from home remotely to a not so secure home environment. We made a huge amount of changes to our technology and our systems,” Jain elaborated on how the company ensured seamless operations during the lockdown.

“I wanted to also make sure that our people are going to have a comfortable environment hence we needed to make sure that we provide them with all infrastructure such as desktops, dongles, internet connectivity, etc. So they are seamlessly connected through technology to serve our customers,” Jain added.

As an AI company, data is very fundamental, so Jain explained to us how the company managed during these months, “For security, we needed to make sure that we deploying technology, and systems to ensure the data is protected so we deployed a homegrown AI-based system to make sure that we are able to provide a very secure environment. And also, it’s just not technology, ultimately trust matters, high level of integrity matters, we had to undergo training for our people. There’s a rigorous amount of training and communication and education that happened through all these months, and people have not let us down.”

“I’m very proud to say we haven’t let our clients down, either. We were also able to protect all the jobs in fact we were able to grow our business by 30% to 40% across our geographies.  Our clients trusted us with more business during these months, just because of the way we were able to deliver services flawlessly executed our plans, along with our clients and our people,” Jain proudly acclaimed.

Animesh Jain spearheads a team of over 9000 people across India and the Americas. Devising ‘talent’ strategies, instituting operational excellence, and instilling the drive to outperform across teams towards building a world-class delivery organization, falls under his purview.

Jain shared with us the USP behind taking ahead such a large, versatile team, and make it into a successful endeavour, “It’s all about keeping your employees motivated and engaged to achieve this large organizational objective. We are like one big family at [24]7.ai, during the last few months, we had to obviously revamp our employee engagement initiatives, because from having people in the office where they are very easily accessible but, now we have to connect with them in a very remote manner. It also became extremely important for us to increase our connection with people because from being in a team environment, people were now working from home and the nature of our job is that we as the company name suggests we are 24 hours people work ing during all hours of the day.”

The company started a lot of engaging initiatives so their employees felt connected and were engaged which Jain elaborated to us, “It was very important to make sure that we have a huge amount of people connect. We also announced a series of new initiatives such as Radio 24/7: an exclusive online platform provided to people every week where they would just connect or not listen to their favourite music etc. We have an in-house Radio Jockey playing to people’s requests. We also have very frequent reward and recognition programs to make sure that people feel good about it. We also brought in fold our peoples’ families where they would participate and could be part of the larger 24/7.AI family.”

On a concluding note, Jain spoke to us about what has been the organization’s learning from the pandemic, “Many of the key learnings have been that every moment of adversity is also an opportunity right from the initial days when you know when the pandemic hit, and the and the various countries are going undergoing a lockdown. We very quickly figured that we need to put things together very very quickly. And as time passed, we understood that there are a lot of opportunities to see so I think the biggest learning has been that any adversity can be converted into an opportunity.”

“Secondly our people are the most important facets. If it was not for people we wouldn’t be in this position so we are people-oriented. Different cross-functional teams came together to provide and implement the solutions in a very, very searched manner. The third one is that trust is foundational to all relationships, and whether it is with our people, or with our clients, like me, trusted our people to do the right things. Similarly, our clients trusted us to do the right things,” Jain concluded.

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