Kustomer Acquires Automation Technology Company Reply.ai

Kustomer, a cloud-based customer service platform provider, is acquiring Reply.ai, a customer service automation company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With Reply, Kustomer will now offer enhanced chatbot and deflection capabilities through its customer service platform.The acquisition also allows Kustomer to provide even deeper intelligent self-service and assistance via natural language processing chatbots, enhanced omnichannel customer deflection, and machine learning-based response suggestions. Madrid based Reply will also accelerate Kustomer's European growth by significantly increasing its presence in the region.

Reply leverages artificial intelligence-based self-service chatbot and deflection capabilities. The Reply suite of tools include deflection capabilities that look at historical and contextual data, continuously improving over time, as well as deflection widgets that can be embedded in forms and email, and features a powerful information retrieval system that extracts relevant answers to customer questions from a company knowledge base. Reply also features a platform to build chatbots that can be deployed across multiple channels and languages, and agent-assist tools that suggest relevant answers to messages and subsequent actions, such as routing or auto-tagging conversations.

"We believe artificial intelligence is essential to helping today's enterprises scale customer service and efficiently deliver exceptional results. We recently rolled out Kustomer IQ to meet the growing need for companies to have access to the power of AI, and with today's acquisition, we continue our investment in bringing self-service tools and intelligence capabilities to our clients," said Brad Birnbaum, CEO and co-founder of Kustomer, in a statement. "Reply has built deflection and self-service chatbots that help companies effectively deflect initial customer communications at an astounding rate of 40 percent. This means that almost half of all initial customer communications can be successfully resolved without requiring live interaction with a service agent, bringing greater efficiency to the entire customer service function."

"We are excited for Reply to join Kustomer and share its mission to make customer service more efficient, effective, and personalized. As a long-time partner of Kustomer, we are able to  seamlessly integrate our deflection and chatbots technologies into Kustomer's platform and help brands more cost-effectively increase efficiency. We look forward to working with Brad and the entire team," said Omar Pera, co-founder of Reply, in a statement.