Our Investment in Quark-the next-gen autonomous support platform that has a unique approach
DNX Ventures leads a $5M investment in Quark: the autonomous support platform that has a unique approach to ML-based support case deflection and auto-resolution for highly over-stretched support teams. The high-energy, customer-focused Quark team has repeatedly brought 30–40% productivity increase to support organizations in high tech companies. What sets the team at Quark apart is their deep knowledge in the NLP and Computer vision space and their deep understanding of the user personas they are serving. What impressed us was the way they have applied complex and deep-learning technology in a layered model creating a fully business-integrated experience, abstracting the complex technology behind a delightful user experience. By doing so, enabling support teams and customers to immediately benefit the value — without training or tuning, without excessive onboarding, and without requiring expensive hardware investments. They bring immediate value and efficiency through automation, based on this ML segment’s highest accuracy model for resolution recommendations to tech support cases.
It’s been said before: as digitalization is taking the world by storm, it makes organizations increasingly compete on their online customer experience. As a result, support experience and time to resolution are as important as ever. And in this new world of SaaS business models, every minute away from using your product is a direct revenue loss. Enabling customers to self-serve support has become a top and bottom-line requirement.
This doesn’t change the challenges that are already pushing support organizations to their limits. To this day, support has had to scale through more people, and has been restricted to finding talent in specific regions with the right tech skills and experience, but also speaking the right language for the customer segment in need. Further support organizations have had to plan their scaling through 24/7 time zones. Yet with an increased velocity of product releases, through the trends of continuous delivery, it has become almost impossible to keep up with all-new features, across a distributed and hard-to-retain workforce. This is where automation comes in. But knowledge and technical skill are very complex to automate.
Further, the workflow of a support agent today is spending 70% of their time trying to find the right answer in documentation or through iterative free text searches. Their workflow itself is tedious and inefficient. Especially since tech space is often rich in versions and images and answers are sometimes hidden in diagrams or tables. It means support agents need to scan through documents, sometimes hundreds of pages of PDFs, to find the exact answer and a corresponding image to solve an issue.
To sum it up:
- Support experience and time to resolution is more important than ever in the digital, self-service world ahead
- Deflection will be a support metric of increasing importance ahead, as support organizations need to scale
- 70% of support agents time is wasted on searching for and reading product documentation, historic cases, internal repositories, and knowledge bases
- Many ML-based support solutions require 6+ months of custom training or investments in expensive deep learning hardware
Quark has taken a new approach and eliminated the need to search and read; they instead interpret incoming information using NLU. Whether the information is being typed into a case system or into a self-service knowledge base, Quark’s deep-learning engine matches the context and provides the top 5 ranked answers (not documents to read), even if the answers include diagrams or tables. This novel approach reduces the workflow of a support agent significantly, skyrocketing productivity.
Further, Quark’s pre-trained models have very high accuracy, without requiring months of custom training, compared to other solutions. It is an immediately useful self-help or agent-assist add-on service within Salesforce or Zendesk support ticket systems, or as an add-on to your existing chat interface in your website. It brings unmatched productivity to your support teams in days, over months.
These are just a few of the advantages of Quark that have allowed an impressive productivity increase for a number of tech support organizations to automate part of their support lifecycle and assist their support agents in their everyday workflows. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to request a Quark demo.
