In the ever-evolving digital landscape, customer experience (CX) has become a cornerstone of business success. At the heart of this transformation is Shyam Nambiar, who joined Avito s director Customer Service, and went on to add Moderation and then Sales Operations in his portfolio in 2023, witha team of nearly 3500 working from 100+ cities. For those not aware, Avito is the world’s largest online classifieds and transactions company, based and operating in Russia.
Shyam was previously at Amazon, working across India and MENA, part of the team that launched Amazon in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He is one of the few globally to have held leadership roles across Customer Service, Logistics and Fulfilment Centre, as also been an interview bar-raiser in Amazon, getting an up-close-and-personal view on everything CX. He is presently based out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, travelling out for work as needed. Known for his commitment to operational excellence and innovation in CX, Shyam has played a pivotal role in Amazon and Avito’s missions to deliver seamless and secure user experiences, and at humongous scale.
Profile of Shyam Nambiar
Shyam Nambiar is a seasoned executive with extensive experience in driving operations and customer experience excellence within high-scale, fast-paced organizations. At Avito, Shyam’s responsibilities span a wide range of critical functions, including automating processes to enhance efficiency and upgrading manual moderation to maintain high speed without quality being compromised. Shyam has a reputation for fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration, ensuring that the top level CX strategy aligns with the expectations of a diverse and demanding customer base. With a background in both operational leadership and customer-centric innovation, Shyam is a key figure in shaping the approach to CX at scale, navigating the challenges and opportunities presented by a vast and complex online ecosystem.
Shyam Nambiar Creating a Unified CX Vision Across Teams
Q. When you took on a very wide role across Sales operations, Moderation, and Customer service, which are considered very vastly different areas, how did you create a unified vision for CX at company level? How do you ensure alignment in CX goals across diverse teams like automated moderation and customer support?
SN: That is a great question. Let us take a step back and work from first principles – this will be a longish answer but will help put the following answers in better context by starting from the “Why”, as Simon Sinek puts it. Sales Operations works to enhance sales efficiency, doing more with less, improving Professional sellers’ experience and take-aways, and through these, company revenues YoY.
Moderator’s role
Moderation’s job is to make sure on one hand that the system immediately blocks or approves listed items to be published, leveraging ML models and AI to make nearly 100% of those decisions and involve manual moderators only in edge cases, and with ultra quick TAT. And when things go wrong unintentionally, at any corner of the experience, customers need CS to quickly and effortlessly solve the issue for them, while of course, making sure malafide customers continue to face the designed friction. If you look at all of these customer-touching domains, moving away from ‘the dance floor to the balcony’ as they say, it presents a beautiful canvas to identify, impact and improve CX across the board in Operations.
Voice of Customer
That essentially is how I look at it, and find overlapping metrics that can be co-owned, to deliver results. One example is Voice of Customers (VoC), which can come through CS (includes agents, social media, Stores and more). And through Sales Managers, which could, say, be about “why are our items getting blocked or reviews getting deleted?”. Clustering and deep diving into these allows better ML model accuracy in Moderation (ie, lower error rates and better content quality). Hence, it brings higher Seller satisfaction (and more willingness to pay, and, with Sales managers aided by ML Auto tasking and such, allowing sellers to pay right and multiply their RoI, and hence, better retention).
This also leads to lesser CS contacts (Contact rate reduction, as a metric), better First Contact resolution (FCR) and hence CSAT! Simple, isn’t it? We leverage continuous, and systematic feedback loops, between human and human in different domains, as well as human to machine, and then, by tracking actions to closure, through periodic reviews, metrics and data dashboards.
Balancing Automation and Human Moderation in CX through Shyam Nambiar
Q. In your view, what are the biggest challenges and opportunities when balancing automation with manual moderation for a platform of Avito’s scale? What measures do you take to ensure that automated systems align with Avito’s customer experience goals without losing the human touch?
SN: To me, there are no challenges here, just endless opportunities. We tend to get over-obsessed with ‘human touch’ at times. If you had 10 minutes left in your life, and a pressing issue to solve with a company before you go, would you want to spend 10 minutes ‘talking to an agent, for human touch’ or, to self-serve and solve it, or, get it done in 30 seconds through a smart bot? Am sure the answer is obvious. So what we focus on is to let machines do most of the repetitive and heavy lift manual tasks, and then provide humans in the loop with the precise information they need to then make a decision that humans can make better than machines, and fast.
Automation in moderation scenario
So the automation in a moderation scenario is focused on enabling nearly 100% of the decisions to be made based on pre-trained and continuously updated machines, while the humans in the loop are at hand to make the decisions for edge cases where machines are not sure. And in the process, we use the latter to improve the machines continuously in their decision-making capabilities, both in width and depth, as well as to enable the humans in the loop to make their own decisions even faster, aka ‘do more with less’. And no, we don’t fire humans, but reskill them to make our machines better, and to focus only on the areas of decision making the machine still are not ideal at.
Moreover, when a business grows, issues keep coming faster than ever, and the trick is to use the valuable humans to do the right stuff. Hence, to me, tech-enabled Operations is all about scale, accuracy, efficiency, feedback loops and continuous improvement, to execute faster and better.
Personalizing the Customer Journey
Q. With such a huge expansive user base, what strategies do you implement to personalize the customer journey and make interactions more meaningful? How do you leverage data to understand and anticipate customer needs across such a diverse global audience?
SN: I will focus on the CX side of things of existing products here, than on new products. Like I mentioned in a previous answer, we have data recorded at every touchpoint, whether it is through a Product CES or CSAT, through Sales Managers’ feedback at personal or system level, to every contact that comes into CS. While each of these is an important input for us to improve CX, we cannot go after every one of them (2.5Mn CS contacts a month, for example). So we cluster issues, use drivers of CS DSAT, non-FCR and Contact Rate (CR = number of CS contacts divided by a chosen business metric, say active listings in a month in Auto vertical, for example) at granular level, to identify markers of the bigger customer issues.
Cost Assessments
Then we assess the cost (in terms of Product and Tech resources) -benefit analysis, to prioritise by impact. For example, through thie methodology, we raised 51 VoCs this year, and already closed 20 of them. This means customers do not need to come to CS at all for these 20 issues any more, which is a huge savings, at scale. Similarly, before every major product launch or change, we organize CJM demos to mitigate CX risks in advance. When one team or business unit sees the benefits of such synergy and communication between CS, Moderation and Sales, it drives more towards it, and thus, spins the flywheel. We even introduced a mechamism to process feature requests (aka customer needs) as well as feedback from employee dogfooding, both of which has enabled multiple CX improvements in Products as well as processes.
We even made sure than ~90% of new employees complete dogfooding on their Day 1, across the company, which is a big win in multiple ways. I am not sure how many companies globally can boast of such a customer-backwards process, and at scale.
Shyam Nambiar Driving Operational Excellence in CX
Q. With a team of 3,500 employees working from across 100 cities and 5 countries, how do you maintain consistency and operational excellence in customer interactions? What tools or methodologies have proven most effective in standardizing customer service processes across such a large team?
SN: I can give you a short answer: “customer obsession and continuous improvement as an organizational culture”. I have worked for 5+ years across Amazon CS, Logistics and Fulfillment, and many of the successful mechanisms have been brought over. I am happy to see that the bar has really been raised by Avito in working backwards from user needs, simplifying and growing a culture of taking bold risks.
Ops excellence
At a more tactical level, Ops excellence boils down to accurate and reliable reporting at every touch point on CX, regular review cadences at different levels of company leadership, owning, tracking and delivering to goals and enabling all employees to speak up and share their feedback on what can be done better and how – both on CX as well as Employee experience (they are also customers for us, as managers). Along with this, relentless focus on building the talent pipeline, to make long term success independent of specific people, but built on mechanisms that last and keep improving.
Shyam Nambiar on CX Metrics and Measuring Success
Q. What CX metrics do you prioritize at Avito, and how do you ensure that these metrics effectively reflect the customer experience? Can you share examples of how specific metrics have driven actionable insights that resulted in improved customer satisfaction?
SN: The yearly growth is out there for everyone to see, where Avito is ahead of every other classifieds globally, whether in a vertical or across. This has been enabled by everyone across levels being obsessed about customers and continuous improvements. Some CX metrics that we use on the Product side are CES and CSAT, in Moderation, it is Content quality (or, Error rate), and in CS, it is CSAT, FCR and CR. I guess the previous answers adequately describe the interplay and how we leverage these for overall CX gains.
Empowering Your Team for Better CX
Q. How do you empower your team members across various departments to take ownership of the customer experience? What initiatives have you implemented to create a culture where employees feel connected to Avito’s CX mission?
SN: Empowered delegation is what works, where clear DACI matrices agreed upon in advance leave no room for doubt on where individual decisions can be made and where it takes more heads to come together. Also, ownership of goals at different levels empowers the owners to make the needed decisions towards achieving them, often with co-owners from diverse functions. And so, it also is about playing as one team, than as different functions existing and working in silos, focused only on their own KPIs. And the organizational culture as the foundation to make it last and to be effective at scale.
Challenges of Operating at Scale according to Shyam Nambiar
Q. Avito is the world’s largest online classifieds and transactions company, and growing very rapidly YoY. What are the unique CX challenges you face operating at this scale? How do you address issues such as scalability and obvious differences in customer expectations?
SN: When you are growing fast, you inadvertently break things; you can never do a long drive waiting for all the traffic lights to turn green. So, we stay nimble, with the agility of a startup, but with continuously built and improving processes, for success at scale. While we cannot customize to every customer’s unique requirement, we listen to their voice constantly to know if we are doing right, and where we need to focus more. Working backwards from CX is an area where we made excellent progress since 2023, and that is hugely attributable to the top management being invested equally into it – we have about 60 customer interactions organized every quarter with the senior leaders, just to understand customer feedback, benchmark ourselves and keep raising the CX bar.
Engagement survey
We also have a few questions in our six-monthly engagement survey, which measure if all of us believe there is adequate focus on CX as much as revenue, ways to surface improvement feedback and whether we work backwards from user needs, and these give us numeric evidence of how we are faring, to navigate to our North stars.
Future of CX at Avito under the leadership of Shyam Nambiar
Q. As Avito continues to grow and adapt, how do you envision the future of CX in online classifieds? What emerging trends in CX technology or methodology are you most excited about implementing at Avito?
SN: I am super excited about the use of AI and LLMs for easing Operations, doing more with less and scaling fast, while enabling humans to work smarter using these tools and also to continuously help improve the quality of the machines that support. Worldwide customers are looking for value for money, convenience and choice, trust & safety and speed. These are basic human characteristics. So staying close to the customers allows both to fine tune what we already have rolled out as well as to spot areas of future opportunity, and move fast to capture them. Online classifieds is no exception to this global trend, in my personal view.
Maintaining Security and Trust in Transactions
Q. Given the transaction-driven nature of Avito, how do you prioritize trust and security as part of the customer experience? What steps do you take to ensure that Avito remains a safe platform for all users while delivering seamless CX?
SN: We have a very high bar on Trust & Safety and we will absolutely not compromise on that. Where we have very high confidence that a customer is up to no good, we take preventive actions to keep the majority of legitimate users safe, and retain customer trust. Technology is a key enabler in allowing us to meet our high bar on this, while not creating inconvenience to genuine users. And where we are wrong, we immediately use that ‘false positive’ feedback to make improvements to our algorithms, to keep the wheel spinning faster.
CX Lessons and Insights from Shyam Nambiar
Q. What lessons in CX have you learned from leading such a large, diverse team at Avito that could benefit other CX leaders? What advice would you give to companies looking to balance rapid growth with maintaining high-quality CX?
SN: I think a lot of this may be a repetition of my previous answers, but let me try and summarise specifically for this. I have been fortunate to work in leadership roles at two outstandingly customer-obsessed companies in the world today, which shapes my thinking not just at work but even in personal life. Anywhere you are, if you think deep enough, you will find customers around, not necessarily of the paying variety. When you are teaching a class, the students are your customers. Their time and effort are precious, and you need to be able to convey the core of what is needed in minimum time, with least effort for them and in as simple a way as possible.
Balancing act
Thinking this way has allowed me to not just reduce effort for others, but also use my time well and have an outstanding balance between work and personal life, without compromising on either. I try to build this culture in my teams too, which is a reason why we work like crazy to get response rates in engagement surveys of close to 100%, irrespective of what the scores are. We use the feedback to make improvements, openly talk about them and when the teams see this actually happening, it catches on – they know they can speak their mind and contribute to improvements, rather than feeling aloof and helpless.
Driving rapid growth
Similarly, when this works at a company level, it enables driving rapid growth as well as amazing CX improvements. The proof is out there for all to see!
Thank you, Shyam. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, leaders like Shyam Nambiar demonstrate the importance of innovation, adaptability, and a customer-first mindset. His journey, from spearheading CX initiatives at Amazon to scaling operations at Avito, is a testament to his vision and expertise in navigating complex ecosystems. Shyam’s insights into operational excellence and his dedication to delivering seamless customer experiences provide valuable lessons for businesses striving to succeed in today’s fast-paced, customer-driven world.
