Episode 70: Ujj Nath - Co-Founder & CEO of MyKaarma

Speaker A: Foreign. Uh,

Speaker B: Welcome into Full Throttle, the Presidio Group's automotive industry podcast. I'm your host, Jason Stein, managing director at Presidio.

Speaker A: We are being called by dealers because dealers are missing 50% of the phone calls that come in. They're not answered. They're going to voicemail. It's not a good interaction. If you stitch up these interactions together, you get an amazing service experience or you get a lousy service experience. Now, uh, which camp are you in as a retailer?

Speaker B: Today, we're joined by one of the industry's most influential technology entrepreneurs, A founder who has spent more than two decades helping automotive retailers navigate one of the most significant transformations in the history of the service business. Ujnath is founder and CEO of My Karma, a platform that has become synonymous with modernizing fixed operations by connecting dealerships and consumers through communication, payments, service workflows, and digital engagement. And there may not be a more fascinating moment to be leading a company like My Karma than right now. The industry is balancing multiple realities simultaneously. Consumers increasingly expect Amazon. Like convenience and transparency, dealers are under pressure to improve retention and profitability. Artificial intelligence is reshaping customer interactions and operational efficiency. And service departments are becoming more critical than ever as retailers seek new ways to drive growth and deepen customer relationships. At the same time, My Karma continues to expand its platform capabilities, integrate new technologies, leverage AI across the customer journey, and help retailers rethink how service can become a true competitive differentiator. In this conversation, Ooj talks candidly about the evolution of dealership fixed operations, why technology should simplify rather than complicate the customer experience, and how AI and automation are fundamentally changing the relationship between dealers and their customers. And we also spend time discussing entrepreneurship, building a category defining company, and what HUGE sees as the next opportunity for automotive retail. It's UJ Nath on Full Throttle.

Speaker A: Hi, this is OOJ Nath and this is Presidio's podcast, uh, Full Throttle.

Speaker B: It is always a pleasure to be around UJ because he's on the cutting edge of the automotive retail experience. And that's a lot of what we're going to focus on today. But first I want to focus on. Thank you for joining the program. It's a pleasure to have you on Full Throttle.

Speaker A: U. It is my pleasure entirely. Thank you for inviting me, Jason. I am always thrilled when I'm talking to Presidio.

Speaker B: Excellent. Let's talk about the automotive landscape right now. And, um, we'll begin with the retail experience. I know you focus a lot of your time and energy on not Only customer experience, but dealer efficiency. Where is the biggest disconnect between what consumers want and what dealers are delivering right now?

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting. When we started our company and this was like going back to 2014, 2015, January or when we launched our product, we focused on communications because it was my thesis that when a retail consumer interacts with a dealership, they are typically doing that over a 48 hour period and they're really interested in their vehicle. What's the status, what's the holdup, what's wrong with the car? And it all boils down to a very simple metaphor, which is consumer interactions with the dealership. And they need to have three different things. They need to be convenient, they have to be transparent, and they have to be contextual. And you get an exceptional interaction. That's why we call ourselves a customer interaction management company. And guess what? Now with AI, that's become the forefront, we are being called by dealers because dealers are missing 50% of the phone calls that come in. They're not answered, they're going to voicemail is not a good interaction. If you stitch up these interactions together, you get an amazing service experience or you get a lousy service experience. Now which camp are you in as a retailer?

Speaker B: It's very binary then.

Speaker A: It's very binary. Yeah, you know, it's very interesting and if you may, uh, you just humor me, I'll give you an experience. I live in Manhattan Beach. There's a local restaurant right on the beach. It's called the Strand House. I've been going there forever and I, anytime any bankers show up or any major client show up, I take them there. Uh, and it tends to be a decent sized bill, like 800,000 doll dollars or so. It was my anniversary on January 5th. I took my wife there. Me and my wife, we both knocked. Very tall, not very big. So we eat, you know, a reasonable amount. But we are not big eaters. I walked in and the person says, Mr. N, thank you for coming. Thank you for last week's dinner. Uh, you know, you 11 people that came, I hope they were all happy. It was a big bill, as you can tell. The lady walked me. They got me the, the seat in the balcony all the way out in the patio that overlooks the ocean. The best seat in the house. I sit down, the lady that walked me there said the same thing. The waiter said the same thing. The helper to the waiter said the same thing. You know what we did? We ordered $500 between the two of us and we Were walking home with bags in our hand. Why? Because the interaction was so pleasant. They made us feel great. They made us feel like they knew who we were. It was contextual. They reminded me that I like the octopus as a daughter. Now when, when a waiter does that to you, you feel special. It's not very complicated. You need to make your guests feel special. They're coming to you with a 70, 80, $100,000 car and they're trying to get it serviced. You get one crack at it one day, maybe two. Make them feel special. Every experience, every interaction has got to be excellent.

Speaker B: Why, why are we still falling short there? What, what is the, where are the biggest sources of friction in that, uh, custom.

Speaker A: So let me tell you why there's a big source of friction. It used to be pretty good when we used to only do phone calls and people were used to picking up their handset at home. In came the cell phone. All of a sudden texting came out, email came out. Now you got three channels and people are switching channels so they, they call the desk of the advisor which tends to be the main number and it says press 1 for sales, 2 for use card, 3 for service. They press 3. Guess what um, retailers do because they're so afraid of missing a phone call, they let every phone ring. Guess what the advisor does in response. They don't pick up. They let it go to voicemail because they don't want to pick up a phone call for somebody else they're so busy. So now we start the loop. The guy who picks up the voicemail, which is typically now the BDC says hey, you know, Jason was here for his Toyota truck and he wants to know how long it's going to take. The advisor picks up and calls you from M. The main number that's not registered on your phone, it's a random number, it goes into your voicemail and this whole voicemail tag starts. There's these kind of fragmented, you know, experiences the ah, consumer has to go through and they're very frustrated by the way. That's why I started my company. That's exactly what happened to me when I took my car in for service. So what we have done is we've come up with a single number concept when you come into the store. And by the way this translates to every other vendor out there. I'm not trying to say we're the only guy. Lots of people have copied us and they do this, gee, when you go into a store you get a text message from that number with a V Card, a contact card. You save it. That's the number for the dealership. Now, when you call that number or text that number, we figure out, is there ro open? Oh, Jason is my advisor. Uh, we ring his phone directly, and it pops on his desktop saying, who's just calling? So now this context. Remember, there were three things. Convenience, transparency, and context. Now, um, the first two, I express. Now, transparency. We record every phone call. We transcribe it. So in the future, if you like me, forget what you said yes to. They can hit a button and text you the recording and say, Mr. Nat, you did say it was okay to change all four tires, not just the front two. And you apologize, you text back, that's it. And it's all coming from one number. And if you get a phone call from that number, you're in a meeting, you go, many of the tables say, hey, what's up? They send you a picture. They say, you know, your CB boot joint is leaking grease. We got to replace it in 1600 bucks. You're a busy man. What are you going to say? Okay, go get it. They're going to have.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is the sort of the problem where when you think from the inside out, you're a dealer and you're thinking about your systems and you've got fragmented systems. All you got to do is flip it around, think backwards, look at the consumer and see what they see, make it really easy for them. That's why we're struggling with AI. It's become easier now.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to get to AI in a second. Uh, dealers are under so much pressure to do more with fewer people. We also see margin compression that's now popped back up again. Where do you see the greatest opportunity to improve that operational efficiency? And how much time is currently wasted by dealers maybe navigating multiple systems for duplicate processes?

Speaker A: Yeah. So think about, what does a fixed operations department sell? You know, airlines sell seats. Fixed operations departments sell labor hours.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: By the way, they're flat rate. So it's not like you get paid more for replacing a tire. But if you can get that same tire replaced while the truck is up on the lift, that saves you time. Your effective labor rate is higher. Right. So that's the biggest opportunity. Can you compress the amount of time, the throughput of a vehicle through your technician bay, that gives you many extra empty seats you can fill, which gives you more labor hours billed. And there's a proportionality with parts. You know, is it 60, 40? Everybody debates. It is a 50 50. So you sell $50 of labor, you're going to sell $50 of parts, both of which have, uh, margin. Obviously, the labor margin is much higher. So that's why every fixed ops director is so worried about productivity and the labor hours that they sell. But that's the area you got to compress. Now, how do you do that? That's the key question. Well, when you start with the appointment, and I know you want to talk about AI later, but I'll tell you why I'm, um, I'm talking about AI now.

Speaker B: Yeah, go.

Speaker A: When you make an appointment with our voice bot, we don't just make an appointment. At the end, we say, Mr. Stein, would you mind if we asked you a few more questions to expedite your services? You say, yes. You mentioned there's a rattle on your truck. Is it in the front? Is it in the back? You said it's in the front. Is it on the right? Is it on the left? It's on the right. As a driver, it's on the right. Okay. Does it increase with speed? Yes. Does it become louder when you go over bumps? Yes. Are there any dashboard lights on? No. So we take all of that, summarize it into a customer complaint AI summary, put it in our video MPI form. So when the technician opens that video MPI screen, he's not now calling the advisor and saying, hey, dude, there's a rattle. Where's the rattle? Is it in the front? Is in the back? Now you're spending another 30 minutes trying to figure out what to look for. And guess what we're doing next. We're now, because we have a corpus of data which is, like, I mean, humongous. We've got so many repair orders, we're building what in this AI world is called a knowledge graph. So we will know when that happens, what the most probable cause is. If it's the CV axle that's causing that, because the steering wheel is not pulling to the right, we will check the parts desk to say, hey, do you have a CV axle for a 2022 Tacoma Tundra 4X? Uh, again, that compresses the time. If you focus on the technician, by the way, and you compress the time and you focus on the communications layer, keep the status of praise with the customer. I think that's the magic portion. Combine those two. We are running a aeroplane with all the seats filled every time it takes off.

Speaker B: Let's continue on AI A lot of conversation, a lot of talk on this program about it. A lot of Talk in general, which functions are most likely to be transformed by AI, say over the next three years? If I'm a dealer listening to this, where do I need to, where does my North Star need to be shining?

Speaker A: So the North Star again, if you, you gotta look at it from a, ah, consumer standpoint, flip it around, do all your design thinking of your consumer as your customer, which it is, and what will make them happier and more likely to approve repairs with you. So that's where AI comes in. Now, um, obviously the, the first layer of that is already out there, that everybody and their brother has a voicemail, right, that answers phone calls and supposedly makes appointments. And a lot of them do make appointments, but then focus on the next level of detail. Do they capture the complaint correctly? So that little value add that I talked about, so you start there. Uh, the second is the back of the house. AI is going to help technicians diagnose faster, write the stories faster, submit warranties faster, get less debits. Those are uh, two big transformations. I see. I'm only going to talk about fixed operations, which is where we focus. Those are the two. And the first one is already happening. Is it mature? No, I think in another year or so it'll be mature. But the second part of the house is much trickier. Inside the shop. Diagnosis being able to help. You know we have a huge technician shortage, you know that, right, Jason?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And you get these rookie technicians. What do you not want happening? You don't want comebacks. So when they do a diagnosis and they're putting it into the MPI or into the dms, you need to flag immediately that, listen, but this a symptom. This doesn't look like the right repair because we've got 10,000 of those repair orders in our system and they tell us that you should be changing the CV axle, not changing the wheel bearing. It's going to help us on the back end. That's a little trickier because now the AI has to house a body of knowledge. And I think what people are doing is they're starting to use standard AI engines in the standard AI engines will index everything that's out on the Internet. You don't curate that knowledge. And A.I. like everything else, garbage in, garbage out. So you're going to get all these bogus recommendations and guess what? The technician does because they're flat rate. If the recommendations aren't, um, the first two on the list, they're going to stop using your system. So that's the harder transformation and that's the transformation we're going after over and above the front end, which is the customer interaction and piece. And then the final piece is context. Okay, what does that mean with customer interaction? I'm a Delta Medallion member, um, platinum or whatever that highest level is. Okay. So when I call my premier desk and I want to know if the Runway in Newark, New Jersey, which has been under repair for a while, are the planes landing on time. Because I have a meeting with BMW when I called him and said, Mr. Dance, I see you flying out tomorrow at 9am thank you so much for being a loyal customer. Blah, blah, blah. What are you calling about? Are you calling about that flight? I say yes. Has that flight been on time for the last three days? Yes, it has. Well, we have to hover a little bit. Maximum is 20, 30 minutes late. Great. Now I'm on the phone, and right at that point, I look at my phone, I say, damn, I got a meeting. I got to go into the meeting. So they give you a choice of switching to text. I, uh, switch to text to get the same information. Guess what it does. What's your name? First? What's your last name? Second.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Which flight? When? What's your medallion number? Same phone number, by the way. That's doing the conversation. You lost all context. In our system with A.I. uh, when you say, switch to text, we will send you a text message with a summary saying you were about ready to pick the transportation type. What do you want to do? Will you wait? Do you want a loaner? Do you want an Uber? You say, no, I'll wait. Okay, appointment made. So you have to transfer context to every communication channel. People don't get that. They don't ever look at a design from a consumer's viewpoint. They always look at it from their viewpoint.

Speaker B: That's the seamless. That is truly the seamless omnichannel experience that everyone is striving for. Do we get there within the next three to five years?

Speaker A: You'll get there with us. We're the only company in the world not in automobile in the world that has filed a patent for this, and we'll be able to do that. And we do it today in testing. We'll roll that out in the next month or two months. So the big thing is, for us, the reason we succeed, we work backwards. And it sounds like a negative, but no, it's a Toyota way of thinking. We start with the consumer. We work backwards into the process, and we look at every interaction point and take the friction out. So it's a totally frictionless experience. And by the way, the side effects of all of that is your labor hours increase. You make more money. We were the first to introduce videos on a large scale into this industry. What did that do? That increased transparency. So when you call as an advisor and say, your BMW X5 has a leak, consumers like BS. I don't see an, uh, oil spot on my garage. How can you tell me there's a leak? Well, there's now a felt lining that absorbs the oil. You translate into video, and you're pointing with a shining light. See, it's leaking here. Guess what the consumer does. It's transparent. Now, Amazon did that with their tracking. They tell you whether the package is at. When it's close to you, it's 10 stops away. But that's transparency.

Speaker B: Yep. Uh, just a couple more things. Which industries? Because you're across a lot of other industries, too, or you examine other industries. Which industries do the best job creating some of those exceptional customer experiences. You mentioned Amazon just now, Amazon, um,

Speaker A: is by far the North Star. If you look at them, they are so focused. So here's another interaction with Amazon. When you go to return a thing on the website, it'll ask you to pick which product you're returning. So you pick the product. Next, it'll say, how do you want to interact with us? Do you want to chat with us or do you want to call us? Uh, you say, call me, it'll call you. It'll authenticate you. And you know what the agents are trained to do? They know that 80% of the calls that come in are about returns. They'll say, are you returning this product? Because you've already picked the product. The context is there. You say, yes. Would you like the refund in your account or the original payment balance? Uh, payment method, which is the Visa card or whatever you use. You say, my account because you've been programmed. And that's the most convenient and simplest experience. My account on Amazon, sir. Done. Anything else? 20 seconds, you've done a return. Tell me any other retailer that does that, that level? Nobody. Why do you have the brown box syndrome at your house? Every day you show up, there are like five boxes, and they're all Amazon boxes.

Speaker B: Because it's so easy.

Speaker A: It's so flipping easy. It's convenient, it's transparent, and it's contextual. When you're buying a product, they show you other products that relate to that product. They don't try and sell you a

Speaker B: car or order again.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, order again. Guess what happens when you go to a retailer's website, there are all these things popping up in your face. 80% of what, you don't need any of that. Uh, so dealers use a design paradigm, which I hate, and I call it just in case. Right. And whereas you have to be just in time, which is the Toyota philosophy. Just in case you might need to chat with us, I'm going to pop it up right in your face. Or, uh, on a small mobile phone. There's barely any real estate left to even do anything.

Speaker B: Right, right, right.

Speaker A: I know you're smiling, but listen, you're a consumer just like me, and we have to fix this when we take our car.

Speaker B: You're. You're spot on. Yeah. All right, uh, final thing. What's the most important thing the dealer should be focused on right now to improve their business? And what will change the most if we go out a few years? 2030 is not that far away. By 2030, the customer and employee and dealer perspective be.

Speaker A: So I work backwards from 2030. So who knows what's going to happen in 2030? When? Today? 2026. Every month today is a SpaceX, uh, IPO. Right. BlackRock placed a five billion dollar order. Right. Uh, and it's on fire. Why is it on fire? Because they're talking about these computing platforms in space that get energy 24. 7. According to Musk, even if we power up all the needs of the Earth, we'll be using less than 1% of the sun's energy. Right. So by 2030, if that's a reality, this whole world would have changed so rapidly, it's hard to predict what's going to happen. How about we focus in the next one year, what we should do?

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: So cars are more reliable, some of them are electric, which are even more reliable. What does that do to the fixed ops director? The amount of dollars that, uh, the fixed ops director is now getting in there in their technician shop is going down. Right. So what do you do? You have to compete with the independents. You have to bring more of that work back into the store. Well, that's easy to say, but hard to do, especially if the car has left your shop. Let's say you approved a cracked suspension, but you forgot to approve the tires. Once the car left the shop, they're not coming back to get the tires replaced with you. They'll go to Costco, they'll go to Discount Tire, where it's much easier to do. Right. So I think the focus for the next one year should be how do you maximize your Reds and yellows on an MPI while the car is in the shop. And one of the things our dealers, our progressive dealers are doing is they're creating what I call closers. These are guys who, through AI are getting recommendations. Hey, this lady said yes to the cracked suspension, but that's what's causing the pitted tires. And she didn't say yes to the tires. So you send them a text message with saying, hey, you said yes to the suspension, but I think you should change the tires too. And click here to see the exact state of your tire. So when they click there, they go to the exact spot on the video where the technician is talking about the tire. With today's ADHD world caused by social networks which have, uh, made us totally antisocial, People don't have any time. They won't even watch a three minute video. They watch the first 30, 40 seconds and somebody is offering them a latte and then they switch to that, Right? So you gotta solve that problem by being contextual, convenient and transparent. Again, the three mantras I keep talking about is pretty simple.

Speaker B: Ujnath, I love it. Thank you for shedding some light in, uh, incredibly important areas for all dealers, the industry in general. Appreciate your perspective and how much it's going to change. We'll have you back on to talk about how it's all going to change as well, or how it has changed.

Speaker A: Okay, thank you so much, Jason. Always a pleasure. You know, getting on your show is a privilege. Okay, thank you, UJ.

Speaker B: It's a privilege having you. That's the 70th episode of Full Throttle. And a special thanks to my guest, Ujna. Thank you for listening. And for a library of these episodes with industry leaders, go to the presidiogroup.com and you can find a library of these shows on the Presidio Group's YouTube channel. I'm your host, Jason Stein. We'll talk to you again next time.