Customer service is likely one of the most vital relationships between a enterprise and its buyer, and that was made much more clear through the international pandemic.
Though Thankful AI CEO Ted Mico and his co-founder Evan Tann didn’t begin out with expertise from the enterprise aspect, they began the Venice, California-based firm in 2018 out of frustration as prospects.
“Companies will offer you a chat box, but no value along with it and a method that consumes vast amounts of time, and we thought we could change that,” Mico advised TechCrunch. “There were statistics that I read in media articles that customer service was a $350 billion business, a large total addressable market, but it is a mess. We also read that we spend something like 43 days of our lives dealing with customer services. Well, Thankful is here to give you three weeks of your life back.”
Traditionally, customer support is considered “the caboose” of a enterprise, however Thankful believes it must be the driving force. As a outcome, corporations spend giant quantities of cash in advertising to get a buyer’s consideration, however when there’s a drawback or a buyer has questions, it’s a customer support workforce that is available in with little to no data of any present relationship, Mico added.
That’s the paradigm that Thankful desires to shift. After being based, the corporate spent greater than two years constructing out its synthetic intelligence customer support software program. Mico known as it “the application layer on top of the help desk,” to deal with giant volumes of buyer queries throughout any written channel {that a} buyer desires to make use of, like electronic mail, social, in-app, chat or textual content. The platform has processed and realized from over 30 million customer support tickets up to now.
It has three merchandise: the primary is an agent help that helps a human agent resolve issues by intelligently routing and suggesting replies, enabling the agent to be as much as 40% extra environment friendly. The second is an AI agent that manages all the course of, not solely chopping the time to first response, but in addition resolving as much as 50% of queries. The third is Thankful’s analytics, which is simply getting began, to offer knowledge on what prospects are saying about their journey.
Over the previous 4 years, Mico stated the corporate has quietly curated a buyer listing that features over 50 manufacturers, together with UntuckIt, FabFitFun and MeUndies. It can also be partnering on the assistance desk aspect with corporations like Zendesk, Kustomer and Gladly.
Also throughout that point interval, the corporate skilled 400% 12 months over 12 months development. To proceed to fulfill that demand, Thankful closed a brand new $12 million spherical of Series A funding. Joining Alpha Edison is Bonfire, Ten-One-Ten, Greycroft, Omega and Miramar. That, together with an unannounced $three million, offers the corporate a complete of $15 million in funding.
Thankful Agent Assist. Image Credits: Thankful
The firm is the newest to go after customer support, an space that can also be attracting enterprise capital and M&A. For instance, prior to now few months, corporations like Sanas, Zendesk, Level AI and Goodcall have made information.
Robey Miller, accomplice at Alpha Edison, stated Thankful was a pretty funding due to the corporate’s concentrate on the post-purchase setting. Much of the information on this space is unstructured, so it’s exhausting for manufacturers to trace it in a structured method.
“Thankful provides a tool set instrumental in customer service in a way that has never been available in the past,” he added. “Traditionally, this area was measured by rudimentary metrics, and we think Thankful’s technology makes sense of the data exhaust to allow you to understand how customer service drives or changes outcomes.”
Miller believes that Thankful is properly positioned to be on the forefront of experimenting and pushing the envelope with customer support as manufacturers hunt down instruments which can be insightful, actionable and one thing that they will belief.
Meanwhile, Mico intends to make use of the brand new funding so as to add extra engineering…
