Customer experience is one of the most important areas of focus for companies. According to For PwC, 73% of all customers cite experience as a key factor in purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality. But the pandemic has increased the workload of support teams, making it difficult to hire customer service representatives and keep losses low while maintaining a high standard of customer experience. The average turnover of contact centers is 45%, at least double that of other departments.
There is no silver bullet. But Jorge Penalva is a big believer in using automation technologies to fill gaps in customer service. Will: He is the co-founder of Lang.ai, a startup that is developing a platform that automatically records customer conversations to help resolve service issues faster. By interacting with services using intelligence, Penalva says technologies like Lang’s can create valuable insights into product experiences and strategies.
“Customer service automation is not new. As a business grows, it is common to introduce automation through self-service chatbots to grow more efficiently and exceed customer demands. Ultimately, Lang wants to be a core layer of the customer experience portfolio, enabling teams to build automation and gain better insights by structuring qualitative data,” Penalva told TechCrunch via email.
Lang announced today that he has raised $10.5 million in an A Series funding round led by Nava Ventures ($15 million in total), and is using AI to remove drafts from candidate applications. Customers on existing support platforms such as Zendesk and Intercom. Without a code, the product matches incoming messages, including email and text messages, with labels such as “Talk to an Agent”, “Delivery Problem”, and “Platform Request”. Lang allows companies to visually group the concepts identified in customer service data and configure automation triggered by specific tags (for example, answering package delivery questions with boilerplate text).
Penalva said he and his co-founders, Borja Gonzalez and Enrique Fueio Ramirez, came up with Lang’s idea while working at a previous startup, Sentisis. Natural language processing platform for Spanish. There, Penalva said he saw that business teams couldn’t leverage customer service data without the expertise of data science departments that had higher-priority work on their plates.
“We realized that we needed to think about the problem in a very different way, not by taking current models of intellectual intelligence (built by and for engineers) and simplifying them for business users, but by creating a baseless platform. for corporate customers,” said Penalva. “It’s not just technology or just the user experience. Both are equally important and that was our “Behold!” The moment. †
Lang isn’t alone in using AI to automatically label customer service messages. Platforms like Levity.ai and Chatdesk also automatically tag incoming service requests, including email and text messages. But Penalva believes Lang excels in both technology and marketing approaches. For example, he said Lang uses AI systems tailored to specific customer domains (e.g. retail, catering, healthcare) to identify industry jargon and adapt to changes such as customer service issues. The startup is working with vendors to develop customer service automation products, such as business intelligence tools, to sell Lang as an add-on.
“Usable labeling of unstructured data makes Lang a data platform that can be used for automation, chatbot workflows and machine learning. [Moreover, the platform] “It will be a logging system for all views, through unstructured user experience data, and provide a centralized source of information across multiple sources,” Penalva said. “Until now, our biggest competition for budget sharing has been no other platform than changing the status quo: hiring or outsourcing more customer experience agents.”
It’s still early days for Lang, but the company’s clients include Stitch Fix, Ramp, Hippo Insurance and Freshly. Annual recurring sales, which Penalva declined to disclose, have increased 11-fold for Serie A over the past five quarters.
With the proceeds from the latest round (which includes Oceans Ventures, Forum and Flexport Fund), Penalva said Lang, with 25 employees, will invest in R&D and its commercialization teams. On the first topic, Penalva says, Lang will work to connect support calls to purchase data to determine, for example, how likely someone with a specific problem will continue to buy the product. Future versions of the Lang platform will make automation recommendations to customer service teams, based on actions typically performed by agents.
“We believe that data is the most valuable asset for the customer experience and support teams,” said Penalva. “With easy and reliable data structuring for all customers, our mission is to help support teams take their place on the leaderboard so that support is no longer seen as a core value, but as a revenue generator.
John Cameron is a journalist at The Nation View specializing in world news and current events, particularly in international politics and diplomacy. With expertise in international relations, he covers a range of topics including conflicts, politics and economic trends.
