MarTech Interview with Shalin Jain, CEO at HappyFox

The Covid-19 pandemic changed the kind of technologies support teams and customer facing teams needed to invest in, in order to drive business productivity. Shalin Jain, CEO at HappyFox weighs in with a few thoughts:

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Tell us a little about yourself Shalin…we’d love to hear a little bit about your journey as a tech founder…and the story of HappyFox….

HappyFox began in 2012 as a cloud-based help desk offering. Today, a little over 9 years later, we offer a suite of products for support teams that includes ticketing, workflow automation, chatbots and business intelligence. We are a team of 80 people with HQ in Irvine, California and an extended team in India. 

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The year 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic has only driven the need for businesses to be more adept with the tools and technologies they use to communicate and collaborate across teams and levels: a few thoughts on HappyFox’s most recent AI feature and how it helps?

The Covid-19 pandemic kickstarted the largest remote working experiment in recent years. Thousands of companies are discovering processes to put in place to keep their employees productive and engaged. HappyFox’s newest offering, Assist AI for Slack, helps companies bring their IT or HR and other support operations into Slack – one of the most popular communication platforms for businesses. Nearly 60% of internal support requests are repetitive questions. Assist AI can automatically answer such common questions and those that need human intervention are escalated automatically. Assist AI’s conversational ticketing capability can increase the IT or HR support team’s productivity and improve employee engagement.

Can you comment on the need for teams today to be more skilled in how they use technologies today to drive productivity and collaborate faster and more effectively, it’s often been noticed that not everyone uses the best capabilities of their tech stack in these cases: how can business leaders across departments like marketing/sales, etc change this?

It’s true. Software products today have such a wide footprint that many essentially useful features go unnoticed. It is important for business leaders to audit their tech stack at a regular cadence to identify opportunities for improvement. Using goal setting frameworks like OKRs is one way to set a cadence for growth and development. Secondly, as more companies start going remote, there is a need to document policies and processes. A self-service strategy with an internal knowledge base software is essential to empower and encourage the employees to find answers themselves.

In terms of support in largely dispersed and remote work times, what are some of the other technologies and tools that you feel leaders should be optimizing for their business?

We see a growing trend towards the adoption of Slack and Microsoft Teams to bridge the communication gap left by email or video conferencing. This trend will only accelerate with time as teams realize the benefits of distributed and remote work.

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In a remote work environment, the internal processes for employee onboarding and offboarding will only become more complicated – for HR and IT teams alike. This is the problem best suited for automation to solve. Workflows help in standardizing internal business processes and documenting them for audits and compliance purposes.

A few thoughts on how you feel the rest of 2021 will create a shift in tech adoption patterns for such Technologies?

There is a rising demand for better internal communication tools and ability to leverage them. There will also be a lot of investment done to enable training and employee retention in a remote or hybrid environment. Workflow automation and AI would be key drivers in delivering a great employee experience. 

Before we wrap up, we’d love to hear a little about your top of mind thoughts on leading teams through a pandemic and uncertain times! 

Providing the team support and care employees need in a remote environment is very different and it is important to acknowledge that and bring in the right tools to support the transition. Technology is a great enabler and we highly encourage everyone to leverage it.