This Seattle Startup Aims To Remove The Expensive, Boring Parts Of Customer Support

by Micah Solomon (that’s me). Originally published in Forbes.com. The author is a consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah:email, chat, web).

Your own business is likely living in what I’ll call Scenario 1: Every customer inquiry and request has to be handled personally by your capable, well-trained human agents–even when the floodgates have opened due to a product glitch or similar event. Frankly, some of these inquiries aren’t worthy of your agents and, anyway, in the floodgate situation, personnel constraints will make a timely human response quite literally impossible.

So imagine a Scenario 2: In this scenario, the simple stuff, the 20% of inquiries that are straightforward, known issues or conform to fully learnable business rules or policies (“customer has requested a refund; customer deserves the refund because X conditions have been met”) can be handled completely and nearly instantly (in less than a minute) and at a cost of under a dollar a ticket. Your well-trained, accomplished human beings agents never have to be troubled with these irritants, freeing them to work on more interesting issues, challenges more worthy of their time, attention and training. [While I have you: my explanation of what makes for great and not-so-great customer service training.]

Enter Seattle-based AnswerIQ, an AI solution for customer support that promises to reduce ticket volume by 20% while significantly increasing first contact resolutions (FCR). AnswerIQ, the recent recipient of a $5M round of funding, was founded in 2017 by Pradeep Rathinam and has a workforce distributed between Seattle, San Francisco and Bangalore.

Paddy, as everybody calls him, is a veteran of the Seattle technology scene, having worked at Microsoft for a dozen years before becoming CEO of Aditi Technologies through when it was acquired in 2014 by Harman International (now part of Samsung). Paddy then found himself falling subject to an obsession with AI and machine learning and the potential he saw for them in the customer support arena, ultimately leading him to create AnswerIQ.

Micah Solomon, Forbes.com: Who are some of your marquee clients?

Pradeep “Paddy” Rathinam, CEO, AnswerIQ: Groupon, Expedia, Twilio and Pinterest as well as leading gaming companies such as Take-Two Interactive.

What do you do for them?

We help our clients in multiple ways to respond to customer inquiries and issues. These include, first off, our “self-assist” and “automated responses” products, which I’d liken to a self-driving car. They enable a business to respond to customer issues entirely without agent intervention. Second, when agent involvement is called for, we provide our “agent assist” solution. This isn’t a self-driving car; it’s more akin to a GPS for agents. It instantaneously gets you the top three responses (like three route options offered by a GPS: fastest, scenic, toll-avoiding) for any customer support question based on historical responses that have been successfully created by human agents in the past. The employee can choose the response they find suitable and deliver it with the assistance of an email template or knowledgebase articles.

How does your approach differ from what the bot-focused companies offer?  

The difference here is that we’re not inventing new, untested responses. Every response that we serve to our clients’ customers is something agents have used, word for word, in the past, something that has proven its value as shown through the historical tickets/cases our system has ingested and the emulation we do of the decisions our clients’ best agents have used to resolve customer issues in the past.

Walk me through how a ticket is triaged when AnswerIQ is involved.

Once a ticket comes in the system, our neural network deciphers the intent and classifies the ticket the same way agents have done in the past (tier of customer [free/premium], sentiment, language, priority, skills needed) and then routes the ticket automatically. All of this happens within seconds without any manual intervention. With the advancement in NLP technologies and the sophisticated algorithm we’ve developed, there should be no need, ever, for a business to manually triage any tickets.

Often, contact center agents and automating technologies are posed as mortal enemies. What is the AnswerIQ philosophy?

Our strategy is to keep the human in the loop, as AI is most effective when it’s augmenting rather than replacing humans. Our primary goal is to assist agents with recommended responses as a way to improve efficiency by reducing average handle time per ticket. Agents appreciate our software because it gives them the most accurate and fastest way to respond to any ticket and takes away the simple, redundant tickets so that agents can focus on tickets that require empathy, creativity and connection.

Finally, two questions to help readers who are entrepreneurs or business leaders themselves. First, can you share your thoughts on working with investors as a startup?

Managing expectations with investors is key. I stress to my team at AnswerIQ that we should do the right thing and execute thoughtfully. If overnight success happens that’s great–but don’t plan for it; a good business is one that you build for the long term.

And second, can you share a hard-earned lesson that may save them grief themselves in the future?

As far as avoiding grief as an entrepreneur, knowing your blind spots is key. Having a co-founder, partner or management team who will pour cold water on your head when you get overheated or overzealous is important. And the ability to take feedback without bias in favor of your own ideas is a key attribute entrepreneurs need to develop.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).