Her startup is putting the customer back into customer support. Here’s how

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Vidya Vellala worked in the corporate world for 15 years, but she’d always had a flair for entrepreneurship. Her career exposed her to several areas – customer relationship management (CRM), back office managing (enterprise resource planning, or ERP), insurance, and banking. When she saw an opening for a better customer support platform, she left her job and started up.

Customer support, as she saw it, was tedious, involving long email chains and customers unsure when – or if – their queries would be read.

In other words, there wasn’t enough “customer” in “customer support.”

In January last year, she founded EvayaDesk, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal that helps businesses keep track of customers’ issues or “tickets.”

Vidya Vellala, founder and CEO of EvayaDesk.

“A customer can fill in [the report] from the business application,” she tells Tech in Asia. “They can also track and update the ticket which they have logged. They can track it from anywhere at any time.”

Customers also get to play an active role in the software and have the opportunity to converse with technicians during the process, which aims to be as easy as a Whatsapp chat.

One of Nasscom’s 10,000 startups, the firm was also one of 11 companies in Blackbox Connect’s sixteenth portfolio, its most recent set. Blackbox Connect is a two-week residential program in San Francisco designed to give international startup founders a taste of Silicon Valley. It offers a small, intimate environment and feedback from venture capitalists, founders, and domain experts.

So far, 14 businesses are using EvayaDesk. Its goal is to eventually serve one million end customers.

The ticket to starting up

EvayaDesk’s team.

Vidya, the company’s CEO, is one of EvayaDesk’s team of four. One of four sisters, all of whom earned degrees in computer science, she grew up watching her mother work in business. A self-professed techie, she completed a master’s in entrepreneur management from IIM-Bangalore in 2013 and worked as an engineer and manager until she founded EvayaDesk.