Customer Relationships Are Broken. (And How We Are Going To Fix them)

Today I’m proud to announce that Kustomer, the company I founded a year ago with Jeremy Suriel, is coming out of stealth with $12.5M in total funding. Our mission is to help companies of all sizes fix broken customer relationships.

We have spent two decades focusing on solving the issue of poor customer service, during which time we launched four companies. Assistly, the latest of the four, was sold to Salesforce and lives on as Desk.com. Throughout our careers, hundreds of millions have been invested by VC’s and tech companies in the quest to transform customer service and strengthen consumer relationships.

Customers Are More Unhappy Than Ever

Despite an increasing focus on customer happiness, consumers remain unsatisfied. There are countless statistics that illustrate the continuing problem:

• 80% of business think they deliver superior service, only 8% of customers agree. (Source: Edison Research).
• 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent successful customer experience. (SDL 2015 The Global CX Wakeup Call Report).
• 62% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a brand or organization due to a poor customer service experience. (2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report).

This problem is particularly acute for today’s connected, mobile-enabled shoppers, who have even higher expectations for customer service responsiveness and active social media accounts that they regularly use in real-time to publicly punish companies that fall short.

Customers (And The World) Have Changed

Why are all the existing tools failing to solve the problem?

The number of point solution applications that touch customers have exploded and the connectivity between them has failed to keep up. Quite simply put, products, solutions and software are still too siloed. A typical customer may touch 10–20 different applications while interacting with a company. Order management systems, social media tracking and sentiment software and customer care platforms don’t play well together or in many cases, at all.

This explosion has happened everywhere — individuals use an incredible range of applications to communicate including chat, social networks, SMS, voice and more. Companies are using an expanding array of applications to run their businesses. The combination of these two trends makes it feel like there are 1,000 ways to communicate and yet no one is really listening. This has to end.

How Consumers Have Changed

Solution providers and companies need to acknowledge that the customer is now firmly in the driver’s seat and orient their offerings and approach to this new paradigm.

We Want To Make Life Better For Customer Service Teams

Imagine if you gave every employee in your company a 10 year old mobile “flip” phone to use every day, when the customers they serve are on smartphones. This is analogous to what companies are asking their customer care employees to work with when they provide siloed software programs that don’t talk to each other. This means a busy service team has to spend 12 hour days toggling between a daunting array of windows to find bits and pieces of information while trying to manage customer relationships and resolve issues.

We have built a platform to solve this problem. Instead of battling competing software platforms and solutions and alt-tabbing from screen to screen to screen, the Kustomer platform unifies everything that agents and teams need in one place. Kustomer users can easily customize their setup, connecting the latest technologies, including social media platforms, messaging services, microservices, Docker and more. Now, teams can spend their days building meaningful relationships with customers and quickly and effectively solving their problems. No more all nighters drinking Soylent and Red Bull trying to keep up.

We are not building a platform for B2B companies. We are not building a platform for B2C companies. Instead, we are building a platform for the future all companies are facing. We call it B2P: Business to People. We are enabling companies to deliver incredible service to every person, everywhere and on every device and platform, all in a way that scales.

We invite you to join our private Beta and get an advance look at what we are building. Good things are coming.