Can it be? The Salesforce Of Mobile CRM?
I’m sitting at a table in True Ventures’s office in South Park, San Francisco. Baishampayan Ghose, our CTO, is across from me. Abinash is to my left, at the head of the table. This table is our office. We’ve been working hard on the product and it’s a really good product but now it’s time. Time to announce to the world that we’ve arrived. That Helpshift is for real.
For real? Shit. What do we do? How do we do it? We’re sitting around our “office” strung-out and tired, jittery with excitement and a healthy bit of fear and far too much caffeine. A marketing consultant we hired to help us is sitting with us, helping us to take a step back and really get into our own marrow. What is Helpshift?
It’s a tough question requiring a lot of hard, exhaustive thinking, and it’s scary as shit, but that grin from the moment Abinash said “You now work for me” is still pinching my cheeks to my ears. Maybe even to the back of my head. This is it! We’re doing it!
So what is Helpshift? — How do we answer that? Well, look at all these businesses building mobile apps. These mobile apps are different from their websites, just like their websites are different from their physical stores. See how customers’ buying habits are changing? As such, how are brands’ customer support changing?
Take Target. Target started as a brick and mortar store. You walk the aisles looking for what you want to buy, and if you need help with anything you find someone wearing that red polo shirt.
As times changed, more people started shopping online, so Target launched a website. Be it buying or returning items for a refund, it’s all done with a click of the mouse via Target.com. But when the customer has a problem, there are no red polo shirts wandering around their living rooms waiting to be of assistance. Instead, there is a phone number, an email address, and a chat widget.
Times change further. The iPhone is launched. Mobile apps become a thing. Target creates an app that allows their customers to do the same things as they can with the website, only now on-the-go, with a flick of their thumb. This has changed how a customer interacts with the storefront — the iPhone is the new storefront. The big question now is: how is your customer support changing to account for this shift? How will your mobile customers communicate with you? Are they going to pick up the phone and call you? Are they going to email you? Or is there something else, something better?
Helpshift bet on that something else.
We bet on a new paradigm, which was in-app messaging. On mobile, people are more used to messaging, especially Millennials. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger — messaging was everywhere, but it was user to user. So a new question crossed our table: How can we bring the messaging to be between brands and customers? How can we become the ‘business messenger’?
There were Facebook company pages, there was Twitter, so there were already ways to communicate with brands, but Twitter and Facebook are public channels. They were not part of the website. Not part of the app. The brand did not have control of the customer experience. The customer says, I have a problem, or I want to give you feedback, or I’m unhappy — these are issues that are not best suited for social media. They don’t help the brand connect with the customer. A more direct mode of communication is needed so that 1.) brands don’t get bad publicity (venting, etc.) on social networks, and 2.) the customer gets someone there immediately to solve their problem. It has to be a more engaged, two-way mode of communication.
So the three of us are sitting around this table that is our office and we’ve been discussing this question, How do we tell the world who we are?, and sometimes arguing, for hours. It’s like 7 pm and we are tired and raw and over-caffeinated, and Boom! There’s our answer! We are like the new red shirt! We take the red shirt that’s so helpful in person, the need for a private channel, and this market paradigm of messaging, and we bring it inside the app!
The customer is incentivized to communicate through this channel because a real human will be messaging with them, giving them direct attention to solve their problem. Brands are incentivized to use it because they can now communicate with the customer in a safe, secure, private channel. Within this private channel, the customer can openly vent, but then the brand can actually respond to the customer — in the app — to solve the problem. The customer then feels satisfied with the service and feels no need to vent.
In this value proposition, both parties are happy. And who is the connector in-between delivering happiness all around? It is Helpshift.
Did you notice what Facebook announced recently during the F8 conference? See what it is trying to do now? It wants Messenger to be a platform for businesses to communicate with their customers. They’re getting it! — We have been doing this since 2012!
And doing it well! Look at the press release we issued back in 2012. Look at the fruits of our labor from all those long hours grinding out a market launch strategy around that little table in True Ventures’ office. In the release, Abinash claimed we were building “the Salesforce of mobile CRM.”
The Salesforce of mobile CRM! What an outrageous statement!
But we delivered on it! As we recently announced, we just closed $23 million in Series B funding. And what’s more — not only is Microsoft now an investor in Helpshift, so is Salesforce itself!
Boy we’ve come a long way.
