Why is customer service so often so bad? The short answer, says Gaurav Passi, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Zingly.ai, is there’s a mismatch between supply and demand. “There are around 16.5 million customer service agents working worldwide, and they have to deal with several billion customers,” he says. “No business wants its customers to have a bad experience, but the maths makes that almost inevitable.”
Zingly, which is today announcing it has raised $10 million of seed investment, is the latest in a long line of businesses to claim that emerging technology can cut through the frustration. Passi founded the business in 2021 with Piotrek Chojnowski and John D’Amour. “When you put the power of artificial intelligence into the hands of the end-customer, everything changes,” he argues. “It enables them to start a meaningful interaction at any time of the day or night, no matter where they are.”
The company’s innovation lies in an app it has christened Zingly-Rooms that it now hopes to sell to a wide range of brands. In some ways, it has the feel of a traditional chatbot – customers who have queries or problems interact through the app, with their case initially handled by an automated agent. This agent gives the customer the opportunity of pursuing other contact channels, but also tries to resolve the case itself, if at all possible; if not, it will involve a live agent.
One difference with Zingly-Rooms is that the technology is built on generative AI, rather than through traditional chatbot algorithms, which provide a more structured and standardised response to customer queries. The app therefore feels more human – and may be better at assisting the customer at speed and in the right way.
The idea is also to go well beyond a traditional chatbot in that the customer’s interaction is retained within their own “room”; customers can return to the case quickly if it is not resolved, and keep track of their interactions over time, rating each one according to their satisfaction. Additional functionality provides customers with further options – the ability to buy a replacement part, say, with the room, if that’s what is needed – and ensures personalisation. The brand itself also gets a rich flow of data about the extent to which customers are happy – or not – with the service they’re getting.
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The key, says Passi, has been to look at the customer service challenge through the eyes of the customer, rather than focusing on new solutions for the brand. “While previous advances primarily benefited cloud migration and support technology for customer service representatives, they often neglected the end customer,” Passi says. “We aim to rectify this by advocating for end customers and ensuring they have the right interfaces for a collaborative experience with brands.”
The million-dollar question, of course, is whether Zingly can deliver what it promises – is it a genuine step-change in customer experience or just another new technology with the same old frustrations? Chatbots, after all, were hailed as the answer to customers’ prayers, but have often proved just as irritating as the customer service solutions they were supposed to replace.
Some commentators are excited. “To truly revolutionise customer experience, it needed top industry leaders like those from Zingly to step back and fundamentally reimagine a new approach,” says Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “Incremental improvements were not enough.”
But the jury, in fairness, is out. Zingly has reached its current stage of development largely through working with a single early-stage customer – a Fortune 500 financial services business. The company in question reports very strong results from its use of the solution over the past nine months, including an improvement in its net promoter score from 62 to 73, and a 350% reduction in the time required to handle complicated asset transfers.
These are impressive results – but only if they can be repeated at other businesses as and when they buy Zingly’s technology. Passi argues that the platform has multiple applications across the whole customer experience, including acquisition, onboarding, service and support, but he is only just beginning a commercial roll-out of the technology.
That process will, however, be accelerated by today’s $10 million fund-raise, with most of the cash earmarked for deployment in Zingly’s go-to-market strategy. The round’s participants include Dell Technologies Capital, WestWave Capital, Scribble Ventures, Formus Capital, Geekdom Fund, Array Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Burst Capital, and a number of leaders in the CX industry.
These investors are certainly optimistic. At WestWave Capital, Gaurav Manglik describes the company’s vision as “once in a decade”. At Firebolt Ventures, Gokul Rajaram, a board member at Coinbase and Pinterest, and a former executive at DoorDash and Square, adds: “Zingly works closely with large complex enterprises to solve deep challenges, and as a result, has built the best platform to disrupt the customer experience industry.”
Time will tell. Competitors in the space are pursuing other technology-driven approaches to improving customer experiences. Ultimately, those customers, and the brands that serve them, will decide who will win.
