MarTech Interview with Zviki Ben-Ishay, CEO at Lightico

Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What inspired you to start at Lightico?

My journey into technology started when I was a child. I was always intrigued by technology and always breaking open devices just to see how they worked, and eventually, as this curiosity grew, I realized a career in technology was what I was meant to do.

My early career took off in working with contact center technology, and I later moved my way up to Solution Marketing Manager at NICE. I found my passion for how technology could solve real consumer pains. I didn’t understand why business interactions had to be so difficult when social interactions through apps like Facebook were so easy. I particularly noticed how business technology lagged behind and burdened by paper processes and outdated solutions. To close this gap, my Co-founders and I started Lightico to develop a solution for enterprise businesses to streamline customer-facing processes and provide the best customer experience.

What is Lightico and how does it fit into a modern Marketing Technology stack?

Lightico is a Next Generation platform for digital customer interactions. Our solution enables businesses to collect eforms, eSignatures, payments and verify ID from a customer’s mobile device in real-time. Lightico replaces outdated onboarding processes with instant customer interactions for companies in banking, telco, insurance, and other highly-regulated industries.

Lightico’s solution is dedicated to onboarding new customers while retaining the existing customer base, a key Marketing activity. Poor CX can cause customers to abandon their conversation with a contact center agent altogether, hurting a company’s Marketing efforts and bottom line. By equipping customer care teams with an advanced digital interaction platform, companies can ensure agents are delivering the best customer experience and increase positive interactions with the brand.

How much has the web-based Customer Experience evolved in the last 2-3 years?

The web-based customer experience has completely changed in the last 2-3 years. Brands have increasingly upped their digital game by focusing on the customer experience, and now people expect the same quick service from other businesses that they get when they online shop or rent a movie.

While customer interactions are faster than they’ve ever been, this quick rise in digital services also has correlated with new concerns over consumer privacy. Companies of today must ensure that they’re providing the highest levels of security and compliance. Consumers care about how their data is being used as much as they care about convenience, so I think we’re starting to see a shift to better transparency when it comes to the online customer experience.

Salesforce acquired Tableau; Google tapped Looker, Adobe acquired Marketo. How do you see these mega-deals shifting the ecosystem of CRM and Marketing Automation toward Data Science and CX-driven platforms?

It’s not about just tracking customer data anymore, but about using the smartest tools to interact with customers and gain real-time insights into the customer experience. Many enterprises are still behind in realizing the potential of CX-driven platforms in driving profitability and Sales for the company. This is especially true in highly-regulated industries. We see the CRM ecosystem shifting most in these industries, where more companies are adopting innovative CX platforms to facilitate business transactions and compete with the experiences many consumer brands provide.

What is the future of e-signature and e-forms for Marketing and Sales? How do they add to Customer Experience?

E-Signatures and e-Forms have the potential to dramatically accelerate the Sales process by reducing turn-around-time and increasing efficiency. For many businesses in lending and banking, the Sales process involves more interactions and steps than a typical B2C experience. However, by offering e-signature and e-forms, businesses can still facilitate the onboarding process at the click of a link on your mobile device. This removes the cumbersome paperwork and still offers the secure verification required by the transaction.

Tell us how you stay relevant to the Personalization trends. How do you see new mobile marketing technologies impacting digital commerce businesses in the coming months?

 A huge part of the customer experience is Personalization, and this comes into play with agent interactions. Lightico enables customers to speak to agents on the phone while completing the transaction on their device, allowing the personal touch of an agent to live on in the digital age. This is one-way mobile marketing technology allows businesses to reach customers wherever they are, without losing the ones who prefer to talk to an agent. In the coming months, I think we’ll see even more companies increase their mobile offerings beyond just a simple app to improve customer loyalty.

Tell us more about your data-driven solutions. How can CMOs optimize their Digital Marketing and Advertising budget using your Products, Services, and Solutions?

When it comes to improving the customer experience, CMOs don’t have to initiate a complete overhaul of their Marketing budgets by trying different programs to serve their customers. Lightico’s solution is driven by advanced technology that can partner with any existing system to streamline the onboarding experience. This is crucial for those industries who have seen their marketing goals hurt by digitization or are missing on a market of more digitally-savvy customers.

How can businesses maximize their ROI from investing in your platform for digital personalization?

Lightico’s customers have achieved a 15% higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) and reduced turnaround time by 80%. Many companies lose out on Sales when a customer abandons the onboarding process because the turnaround time was too long or the requirements were too complicated. With Lightico’s platform, many banks, lenders, insurance brokerages and more are maximizing their ROI by knowing their front-end employees are equipped with the right tools that let them do their jobs better and get customers through the Sales pipeline effortlessly.

Lightico’s platform also helps improve employee retention, another way to maximize your business’s ROI. Poor customer experience can leave employees feeling frustrated and disappointed, which then increases agent turnover. With a smart solution that makes the customer interaction easy and productive, customer-facing employees will feel happier and empowered in their jobs.

Tell us about your technology integrations with other Technology platforms such as Website Analytics, Video, Contacts, Contracts, Email and Customer Service.

Lightico’s platform was built with micro-applications to embed itself in any customer metrics solution companies might already have. Some of these we’ve built ourselves and some are partner applications that allow us to complete ID verification and process payments through a mobile interface. Using open APIs, Lightico’s system can interact with any CRM, ERP or other operating systems a business might have.

Which Marketing and Sales Automation tools and technologies do you currently use?

We currently use HubSpot and Salesforce to automate and gain insight into our Marketing and Sales processes.

What startups in the technology industry are you watching keenly right now?

There are a couple of startups I’ve been watching for a while. One of these is Slack. Slack understood how to get in small and expand from there, building their business using the same expansion strategy as I believe in. Another startup I’ve been following is Zapier, an example of a company that provided a unique solution and ecosystem that can’t be replicated. As a Tel Aviv-based company, I’ve also been inspired by Walkme, who was able to overcome a language barrier and build its solution fast and efficiently, offering a model for how we want to grow.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Business Leader

AI and machine learning are already an integral part of the solutions everyone is using, including Lightico’s. The onboarding process in many industries involves cumbersome tasks, usually completed on paper by an agent. But with smart eForms and machine learning, the information can be pre-filled, increasing efficiency in the process. As a Business Leader, AI has become a huge focus for Lightico, and it’s crucial for us to be at the forefront of innovation so we can continuously improve our product for the end-user.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

It’s important to continuously inspire employees to come into work everyday by giving them the right tools and processes to succeed. With the right technology, employees deliver better results and are more productive, which is exactly what Lightico’s offering is built on. Especially for front-end employees who have to deal with a wide range of customers every day, providing them with a solution that makes this interaction easier for both parties will improve employee satisfaction.

As someone who is inspired by what technology can do to make peoples’ lives easier, I hope to spread this same passion to my employees and customers as well. There’s no reason using technology should feel difficult or confusing –technology products are only meant to enhance our lives for the better.

One word that best describes how you work.

A Hub – I power the rest of the company.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

One tool I can’t live without in my professional life is the Klipfolio dashboard. Its solution allows me to see the current state of every metric at the company and how it evolves over time, which is helpful for me to identify and resolve immediate problems. Another tool we use company-wide is Slack, allowing me to stay up-to-date on daily business happenings. Outside of work, I use Lifesum to keep me living a healthy and nutritious life, which also improves my productivity and energy at work.

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

Every day I use my 90-minute commute to learn something, whether it’s from reading a book or listening to a podcast to stay up-to-date on the industry. I’m constantly working to improve myself, which is one of my biggest productivity hacks before walking into the office.

What are you currently reading?

I prefer usually to listen to books on audio during my commute. I’m currently reading the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I received at the beginning of my career is when building an enterprise-ready business, don’t start with enterprise customers, even if that’s your end goal. Start small, gain traction and revenue, improve enterprise readiness and then go upmarket.

Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

The secret to my success is surrounding myself with people who are better than me. Building a business is about people, and if every person in the business is doing what they do best, together we can all succeed.

Tag the one person (or more) in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Ben Horowitz at Andreessen Horowitz., Claire Hughes Johnson at Stripe, or Marc Benioff at Salesforce.

Thank you, Zviki! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.