Kustomer Offers a New Approach to Customer Information: The 2020 CRM Rising Star Awards

Founded in 2015 to automate repetitive customer service processes, Kustomer has experienced a great deal of growth this past year, securing a slate of highly recognizable companies as customers and in December bringing in $60 million in funding.

The company provides its users with a deep level of service automation by applying analytics and artificial intelligence to data from multiple sources. Its platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services and enables users to search, display, and report on customer attributes, orders, feedback scores, shipping, tracking, web events, and other factors. The technology also uses all of this information to provide agents with context and highlight key data to use during customer interactions. Plus, the platform helps build shortcuts that let agents respond quickly.

Kustomer’s platform also offers a conversational assistant that gathers data for human agents and routes customer conversations automatically. Its KustomerIQ tool, which it introduced in October and upgraded in April, helps companies train and customize Kustomer’s AI, which can surface relevant insights and recommendations. KustomerIQ also includes automated conversation classification, queues and routing, sentiment analysis, language detection, agent shortcuts, and workforce management,

“KustomerIQ has had a tremendous impact on my team’s efficiency. Machine learning instantly identifies the purpose of every inbound conversation, then intelligently routes each customer to a specific team based on their contact reason, such as orders, returns, or clean-out. Rather than spend time manually routing conversations, my team can focus on delivering personalized service and resolving issues quickly to decrease customer effort,” said Emily Marcogliese, head of customer service at ThredUp, an online clothing thrift store.

Kustomer expanded its CRM capabilities in other ways. In May, it acquired automation technology company Reply.ai, allowing it to offer enhanced chatbot and deflection capabilities through its customer service platform and provide even deeper intelligent self-service and assistance via natural language processing and machine learning-based response suggestions.

The acquisition of Reply.ai, which was based in Spain, along with its opening of a data center in Ireland, is accelerating Kustomer’s European expansion.

Kustomer also this year benefited from integrations with Shopify, UJET, and WhatsApp Business.

Kustomer’s integration with Shopify enables the use of Shopify data to identify and segment customers for proactive engagement based on purchase history and lifetime value. Kustomer’s automation features help optimize teams and empower agents to use Shopify data to maintain and resolve conversations.

By integrating with WhatsApp Business, Kustomer now lets companies have personalized conversations with WhatsApp’s 1.6 billion users globally and share images and other rich media with customers through mobile messaging. As with all Kustomer-supported channels, companies can track the impact of their service using the platform’s native customer satisfaction solution to survey customers engaging via WhatsApp. In addition, WhatsApp Business is incorporated into the reporting and analytics of the platform to give companies complete insight into the performance of their customer service teams.

Kustomer’s UJET integration provides customer service teams with rich, unified, and centralized data within the agent interface, helping them streamline their workflows and increase productivity.

“Kustomer was a natural partner for us as we look at providing businesses with the modern stack they need to deliver holistic customer experience transformation,” said Vasili Triant, chief business officer at UJET, in a statement.