Interested in connecting with James Grogan? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Cygnus:

Cygnus was born to address the many challenges of supporting complex connected products. So many companies are taking on IoT initiatives, but many are finding out that supporting complex devices in users’ hands is quite difficult.  Cygnus addresses this issue by providing tools that make it easy to support these complex products from a distance.

Reach was designed as a software platform to facilitate better support of connected devices.  Reach essentially allows a remote agent to take control of any IoT device after a user initiates a support session and authorizes the connection to the device.  Once that session is connected, the agent can diagnose and fix issues with the device directly instead of asking the user to help troubleshoot.  The agent can also use Reach to request real-time audio and video feeds from the user’s mobile device which allows the agent to see any external or physical issues at the same time.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(01:27) Introduction to James Grogan

(02:15) Background of Cygnus

(07:00) Who is Cygnus for?

(10:02) What is the current landscape of IoT support?

(13:00) Who is your typical customer?

(21:30) How can companies do a better job of support?

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Transcript:

– [Voice Over] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

– [Ryan] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All podcast. I’m your host, Ryan Chacon and today’s guest is James Grogan, the CEO of Cygnus. He has over 20 years of experience in a lot of different technology industries and spaces, including IoT. And today’s conversation around what their company does and the role it plays in IoT is something that’s super interesting to talk about because we don’t cover it a lot. It’s actually about the support side of IoT, so how do companies provide better support for the end users of IoT or the companies that are implementing IoT solutions. How does the support piece fit in? When do you need to be thinking about it? How do you integrate it? And the overall value that I think a lot of people could learn a lot from understanding that really plays a role in the success of IoT deployments. So I promise this is a very interesting episode that is worth a listen. But before we get into that, customers choose Losant because it’s a unique low-code approach to application development offers a level of agility and speed to market that is hard to find anywhere else. Losant provides a foundation and lets you focus on delivering the IoT applications that your customers require. Start now and see how the internet of things can transform your business. Visit Losant.com, l-o-s-a-n-t.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All podcast. Welcome James, the IoT For All show, thanks for being here this week.

– [James] Glad to be here.

– [Ryan] Yeah, I’m very excited about this conversation. I wanted to have you quickly just give an introduction to yourself, to our audience so they can learn a little bit more about who they’re listening to.

– [James] Yeah, sure. James Grogan, I’m the CEO of a company called Cygnus. Cygnus is focused on the support and maintenance of IoT products in the field. So our mission is to help manufacturers that are more and more frequently designing smart products.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] We wanna be able to help them take care of those things once they launch into production.

– [Ryan] Sure. Yeah, before we jumped on here, we were talking about IoT support not being a topic that we’ve covered a ton, but I’m very interested to talk more about it ’cause I think our audience can get a ton of value out of it. And I wanted to have you just dive a little bit more into the company a bit. I know there’s an interesting background story of kind of how the company came to be. And then just a little bit about the overall role you play in the IoT industry as a whole.

– [James] Yeah, definitely. So most recently I’ve taken over the CEO a role of Cygnus,

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] But prior to that, five years prior to the last two, I guess I should say was with a company called i3 Product Development, that’s a fairly large design firm in the Midwest that specializes in product development in the connected space. So they’ve got about 80 engineers and designers that do everything from industrial design and mechanical engineering, prototyping, electrical engineering, and then software development apps and cloud technology. So we had a very good view of the industry and talking to 100s of companies over a five-year span about them being in different stages of IoT development. Some of them had already launched a product and were kind of reeling from what happened after that first launch, maybe it didn’t go so well. Some of them were in development and just needed some help along the way, and then some were just thinking about it and wondering about all the challenges that they were gonna face once they launched the product, they were planning really well for it. And, a Very common theme across pretty much all of those clients was this idea of supporting, it’s, something that, prior to them doing this development was not a smart product, it wasn’t very complex.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] It either worked or it didn’t for the most part. Today everybody’s putting all these smarts in them, they’re putting wireless modules, they need to interface with home networks and people. And that those people need to have a good experience. And being able to support that very complex thing that was simple before is not the same.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] You can’t take the same approach to it. You can’t just have a call center and have people call in.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] But that’s how they were doing it. And from our viewpoint, it wasn’t going very well. So what we did is developed a solution, basically a platform, which is what Cygnus reaches today and put it together for one of our clients. And this is three or four years ago now that we were doing that development and realized how powerful it could be. This was an agricultural client that was experiencing had a very complex piece of ag equipment.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And when problems would arise, these farmers would be calling them from the field.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And asking for help. And they would have to ask 20 questions, figure out what buttons to press. And it was not a good experience.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] Versus, think about this when, if you’re having a problem with your PC, you call up your IT person.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] And your IT person their first instinct is I wanna log into your computer and just fix the problem. I don’t really wanna ask you a bunch of questions about it, I just wanna get it done. So that’s what we’re doing with the Reach platform today. And that’s what we did for that client is made it so that they basically had remote desktop to a product that otherwise wouldn’t be connected to the internet or was having trouble connecting to the internet and just turned it into, took a one hour phone call down to five minutes.

– [Ryan] Wow.

– [James] 75%, fewer product returns, 75%, fewer technician visits and just overall customer satisfaction. And just realized that this is really something that could help a lot of people.

– [Ryan] Definitely.

– [James] We could productize this, and so we did. We spun off the Cygnus platform into its own company. And pretty much everybody we talk to is ready to go and ready to sign up for this and know that it’s an issue because they’re either seeing it.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Or they see the logic, and in the problems that these products, they bring a lot of benefits to our products to, of course to the end user. But they can bring some headaches to the manufacturers that are putting them out.

– [Ryan] And are you all focused on the consumer type products that manufacturers are releasing, or is this also potentially for enterprise type clients for solutions that are more in the business space or the clients of the business space and not necessarily consumer focused if that makes sense?

– [James] That’s a good question, I think that there can be a lot of impact in the consumer space, but you take everything beyond that, commercial, industrial ag.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] You know, medical devices, everything.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] We don’t focus on any one industry, it’s across the board connected products. And our platform is there to help support wireless, smart complex things.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] That have been launched into the field.

– [Ryan] And you have to have this somehow integrated in with the product before you launch, or is this something that you can add into a product post-launch?

– [James] This is something that you can add at any time, it’s a software only solution.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] So, it integrates into your company’s mobile app, or maybe you create a simple support utility for it.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] And it integrates into your company’s intranet or helped us software on the backend for that remote agent.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] That’s a good question, though, because some companies are getting a little creative with how they do this type of support, and they’re using like.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Zoom or teams to go download. They’re talking to somebody who doesn’t have teams. They have them.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] Go download the teams app, put it on their phone, and then they start a situation where they have audio and video and try to give themselves some insight into what’s going on the field or out in the field.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] What we’re trying to do is create that perfect user experience so that, if ABC company or I don’t know if I can say a brand on your podcast here, but if you know the Ring doorbell, everybody knows that Ring.

– [Ryan] Yeah, sure.

– [James] Someone’s having a problem with the Ring doorbell.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Or they’ll call up the ring support line. And the Ring support rep is gonna want to say, well, just open your Ring app ’cause I already know you have that.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] And just hit this button that enables this remote connection.

– [Ryan] Ah, okay, okay.

– [James] Yeah, so.

– [Ryan] So that could technically be used across any device by any type of user, whether it’s a farmer that has sensors out in the field and is having problems and needs support to a ring doorbell, like you just mentioned.

– [James] That’s correct yep.

– [Ryan] Okay. most companies with their smart product, they pair it with a smartphone app.

– [Ryan] Okay fair enough.

– [James] Some companies do not, but that’s that doesn’t stop you from using the tools that we’re providing here.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] You can build a utility app and have people download it, but the best user experience is build it into the software, the ecosystem that you already have, and the user will.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] Have zero problem firing that up and getting that session started.

– [Ryan] Tell me a little bit more about the support space in general, this is like I mentioned before, not an area that we talk a lot about, and I don’t know if many people really have insights into how support is actively done with an IoT deployment. So what is the current landscape and what has the current landscape really look like? And tell me a little bit about how, what opportunity that you all saw in the development of your offering to where it is now, just out of curiosity.

– [James] Yeah, that’s a great question. And, I think that I brought up the example of Zoom or teams before, and there’s there’s companies out there that are doing audio video support using mobile technology. And I think they’re using it to different degrees, but unfortunately that doesn’t really give them true insight into what’s happening inside that smart device. And so what we’re trying to do is literally give you that remote desktop connection, like your IT person.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] Would use to just take over the device and fix it. So I think that’s kind of the, a little bit of the advanced support that some companies are using.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] But we’ve talked to so many companies that are, they’re not able to scale their IoT deployment because they don’t have the.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] Support organization in place to, they either don’t have any staff doing support, or they have staff.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] That aren’t capable of taking care of the product. You could imagine a bunch of engineers in a company come up with a connected widget.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] They’d sell it to a bunch of customers and in kind of a pilot phase and inevitably what happens in those situations, if the support organization is not prepared.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] For that, those support calls come back to the engineers.

– [Ryan] Sure, sure.

– [James] And then what happens? The engineers are not able, they’re the only ones who can fix it. They haven’t put a tool in place to enable their regular support team to just take care of these issues. All of a sudden, they’re being kind of pulled down by supporting just a few products in the field and they don’t wanna.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Deploy more. They can’t scale up.

– [Ryan] Right, right.

– [James] And they can’t build new things.

– [Ryan] Interesting.

– [James] So it’s very, I was shocked talking to, it’s probably 25 different companies that have that exact problem where their engineers are kind of handcuffed to the first IoT product that they put out.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And it doesn’t need to be that way. If you have tools to help your regular support staff, the people who are good at that. Enable them and give them the tools that they need to be able to take care of your product as it’s scaling up.

– [Ryan] So let me ask then, when you are working with different customers, is your typical customer a company who already has existing support and is looking for a way to better provide that service to their customers on the solution that they launched the market, or these oftentimes companies who have very little support infrastructure in place and need something to be able to offer support to their customers.

– [James] Yeah, that’s a good question. And it takes all forms.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] Of now you have a startup company, that’s got a hot new product that doesn’t have support people and their engineers are taking care of it and their deployment isn’t really that substantial yet.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] But you also have these large enterprise companies that have their own support organization. And just to be clear, Cygnus isn’t in a position to support their products, we’re providing a platform to enable them.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] To support their products.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] So, you’ll have support organizations that just don’t feel like they have the tools or aren’t prepared, or aren’t trained enough.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And with the types of tools that we’re talking about here with sickness and reach, the training goes way down, you can be less prepared because you’re making it easy to do that kind of support.

– [Ryan] Gotcha. And I know I’ve done over 150 of these episodes and support rarely has mentioned. Why do you think it’s just not as common of a topic as you obviously know it should be, and now I am learning how important it needs to be. Why is it something that’s maybe often overlooked in the development of solutions when it’s talking to customers? Is there a focus elsewhere that they think is more important to get things to launch and to scale and the support is usually an afterthought or, you know, what are your thoughts there on just why support maybe not always or given as much attention as it probably deserves.

– [James] I think that that question kind of delves into the idea of digital transformation for a lot of companies.

– [Ryan] Okay.

– [James] And a lot of companies are going through that. Right now we’re trying to figure out how they would.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And so when you look at these products, you have product managers that are, a lot of times very excited about creating the new product that’s gonna make a splash in the market, but they a lot of times, unfortunately aren’t thinking through all the different, ramifications of that.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] And that also gets into what are you gonna do with all the data that you are collecting? How is that going to help your business? That’s something that, they don’t have the data yet, so they don’t know.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Exactly what they’re gonna do with it, or what all the benefits could be. Support is one of those things. I guess I can’t think of other topics like finance and accounting and whatever.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] On the back end of that. I think they’re very focused on building the nice new toy. And sometimes aren’t considering all aspects. So I think IoT has been around for a while and and it’s still gaining momentum. So many companies haven’t launched a product yet. And so I don’t think that the lessons have been learned.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] We happened to have been in a position with i3 Product Development where we could see all of these different stages of development and launch. And it was such an obvious issue that within i3 Product Development, that’s a primary topic when they’re scoping out these solutions and building out architectures and product. Support is definitely an issue. And that’s something that as a product manager or a product developer, you can get out in front of that, you can make sure that you’re both taking care of yourself, if you’re an engineer building a product.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] And you know that, one day that product is going to not be within your reach, and you’re not gonna be able to debug it and take care of it properly. You’re gonna want some tool in place to be able to do that properly. And that just.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] It kind of accelerates when you get more and more product in the field and you want your support people to be able to do it. So.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] I think that the answer to your question, and so I gave a pretty long one here, but they’re ultra focused on the product.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] And getting it out the door. And they just think that we have a support center, they’ll take care of it.

– [Ryan] Right, right.

– [James] And they’re not equipped to do it right.

– [Ryan] I also think it’s important to understand that in IoT deployment is a very different, requires a very different kind of support at times than a software solution let’s say, for instance. There are some nuances to deploying IoT in different environments and different connectivity types, different levels of scale that it definitely is not always something that can be just replicated from what they’d done in the past, maybe with non IoT solutions. And I think that’s important for people to understand, because I’d be willing to bet a lot of solutions or I guess, deployed into the pilot stage, but then never get past the pilot stage. Part of the, or some of those probably did not succeed because there was a lack of support available to the end user. And it just felt like for them, this was more of a headache than anything else, but if you implement a solid support system, you can actually take off a lot of that burden on the end user, on the customer that’s deploying it to have more success and not really get stuck in that pilot stage when there’s no support to really help them aside from maybe the people who created it. But those are not the people necessarily gonna be helping you along the way, as you scale to 100s of 1000s to millions of devices, potentially.

– [James] Yeah, I totally agree with that. And personally speaking to those.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] Engineers that are on the hook, still supporting that first deployment of their IoT product.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] And they think it’s a pain.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] So it’s kind of, this becomes this albatross around their neck. And they a lot of times don’t wanna do that again, but if they would’ve had the right tools in place, if they’d have prepared for the ability to support a complex thing. For many years, we’ve had PCs. And I keep getting back to this analogy of the IT person remoting into your computer.

– [Ryan] Hmm.

– [James] We’ve standardized ourselves on that. The whole world knows how to do IT support. And it’s hard.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] But we have systems and tools in place to do it well.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] We don’t have that in place, but we do have the model. And so.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] Our Reach platform enables that. And so if people are.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] If people think about it ahead of time, they get it built into their product, they can be very successful and they can scale easy.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] And they can get out of that. They can save themselves a mountain of money just with a couple of stats. From agriculture example I gave, 90% reduction in call volume.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] For a call center, that’s a huge deal. They’re trying to move people through the queue. Fewer product returns,

– [James] If you can fix the product remotely, and it doesn’t need to get returned. what is it, 500 bucks to return a product?

– [Ryan] Right, yeah.

– [James] How many times does that happen in a year?

– [Ryan] Right. You should put a tool in place to reduce that by 75%.

– [Ryan] Sure, sure.

– [James] It’ll definitely benefit. Yeah, the companies that have already launched and are in the, having the issue right now, they’re the ones that, when we started talking about the features of our product, their eyes light up pretty bright because they.

– [Ryan] That’s awesome.

– [James] Have experienced the pain.

– [Ryan] Yeah, for sure. So let me ask you, as we kind of wrap up here, how can companies just do a better job in general of providing support, whether they’re just starting out, whether they already have established products and solutions out in the market, what can they be doing to provide better support across the board for their customers? And on the other side, what should customers really be looking for when they’re working with a company or looking to work with a company when they have support questions and should they be looking for, obviously companies that use your platform, but I’m sure there are other solutions that and questions that they should be coming up with ahead of time. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on how we can just do a better job providing support and how customers on their end can be more proactive in looking for support before they launch a deployment.

– [James] Yeah, that’s a good question. And I would just say the most important thing in my opinion, is have tools for your support reps, take care.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] Of your support people they’re very valuable, and you don’t want them to be in a situation where this just turns into a big headache for them. But aside from that, so that’s what we do here at Cygnus.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] With our Reach platform. Aside from that, I would say, when you’re building your product, when you’re developing it, take a good amount of time at the beginning of that project to think through all the different aspects of what you’re doing and how that affects your organization. And so, the engineer that’s writing the firmware, make your device supportable, write code to allow for these support and maintenance features to be in place and able to be leveraged. So be thoughtful about knowing that someone’s gonna wanna do something like this, put a tool in place to be able to support it.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] So plan ahead. And then.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] If you’re a company that’s on the other end of that and has already launched a product, don’t get frustrated. There are tools that can help you do your job better, Reach is one of them. And it is fairly unique in what we do with the connectivity and how we do it.

– [Ryan] Right.

– [James] I mentioned the audio video solution, get your eyes and ears on site with that user.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] Screen-sharing capabilities. These are other features of the Reach platform that we’re launching.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] Right now. And just take advantage of the tools that people have in their pocket. Everybody’s got this.

– [Ryan] Yeah, sure.

– [James] Extremely valuable smartphone that has a lot of capability to be able to help you do your job better as a support agent. So again.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] Get creative. If we all want these smart products and just IoT in general to be successful. And I think you and I are on the same page with that.

– [Ryan] Sure.

– [James] We’re gonna need to do a better job of taking care of people. It’s very interesting when you look at, consumer products are easy to measure because they’re in the Amazon stores.

– [Ryan] Yeah, right, right.

– [James] And you can look at product ratings. And I challenge people to go and look through some of those reviews and read them and read.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] How frustrated people are with some of those stuff. Some companies do a really good job and they get high marks, but I would say there’s many more that fall on the other side of that.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] And I think a lot of it really has to do with their support. So the other part of your question is, what should people look for? I think that when you have a complex device and you’re launching it, if you don’t have at least phone support for your users,

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] I don’t think that’s fair. I think that people should be able to call somebody to get through.

– [Ryan] Yeah.

– [James] Some of those difficult problems that they’re having. So start with that and put the tools in place that will help you do your job better.

– [Ryan] Mm-hmm.

– [James] And if everybody does that, I think that a lot more products are going to be successful when they do get launched.

– [Ryan] Yeah, fantastic. I totally agree with you. I’m someone who no matter what it is, I would rather talk to somebody than try to sort my way through a library of frequently asked questions and things like that. So I’m sure at scale, especially for a lot of people who, the solution that they’re buying is intended to make their company more efficient or their customers cost, company more efficient. The last thing they wanna do is have to deal with this, you know, after it’s deployed. And that’s not the reason that they went down this path, which is prohibitive to adoption in IoT is if this becomes more of a headache than anything else. So the support tools out there and organizations really focus on the support side, we need to pay more attention to this. And because I think it’s a critical piece in the success of longterm adoption in the IoT space. So I really appreciate your time and kind of shedding light on all this. I wanna finish this up by asking you, if people out there have questions or wanna learn more, just kind of get better sense of what’s going on in the support space. What’s the best way to do that in your opinion, and how can they reach out?

– [James] Yeah, I would say, just go to our website, it’s very easy to remember cygnusreach.com

– [Ryan] Cool.

– [James] And just get in touch through that channel. And we will happily get on the phone and do demos. You can sign up for a free account and check out the platform and all of our, we’ve got source code and sample apps. And SDKs and documentation all over the place. So I think we’re setting people up for success. They just gotta go out and sign up and get the solution built into their systems.

– [Ryan] Absolutely. Well, James it’s been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate your time shedding light on this. We definitely have to have you back sometime later this year, so we can talk a little bit more about what’s going on in this sport space, how it evolves, what we’re seeing, and just continue to bring light to kind of all this area of IoT that I think deserves more attention, for sure.

– [James] Absolutely. Thanks for your time, Ryan, I appreciate it.

– [Ryan] Absolutely. Thank you. All right, everyone, thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT For All podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notification so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you next time.