Commerce

Directly raises $20 million to improve customer service with AI


According to CustomerTheromometer, 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today compared with one year ago. In order to meet those expectations, three entrepreneurs — Antony Brydon, Jean Tessier, Jeff Patterson — argue that a degree of automation is required. They’re the cofounders of Directly, a San Francisco, California-based company helping enterprise companies launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. This morning, to lay the runway for future growth, the company announced a $20 million strategic investment led by Samsung NEXT, Industry Ventures, and AvidBank, with participation from existing investors M12, Costanoa Ventures, True Ventures, and Northgate.

Newly appointed CEO Mike de la Cruz, previously Siebel Systems senior vice president of customer relationship management and Directly’s chief business officer, said the fresh capital willl “significantly” expand Directly’s ability to bring AI and customer experience automation to the market. It brings the company’s total raised to over $55 miillion, following a $20 million series B round in April 2018.

“At Industry Ventures, our focus is to work with leading growth companies, full stop,” said Industry Ventures’ Brian Langer. “Directly saw tremendous growth towards the end of 2019, and the work they’re doing to revolutionize AI and machine learning for virtual agents is outstanding. We’re proud to take the lead on this strategic investment and we look forward to Directly’s bright future.”

Directly’s platform taps AI algorithms trained by thousands of subject-matter experts to analyze contact center interactions and strategically answer, automate, and prevent customer issues. (De la Cruz claims they can reduce support ticket volume by up to 80% and cost by over 90% per customer contact.) They’re designed to integrate with existing customer relationship management platforms and messaging apps including Microsoft’s Bot Framework, Salesforce’s Einstein Bot, and Google’s Dialogflow, matching chatbots and human agents with customers across channels in a unified experience.

Autonomous customer service agents are fast becoming the rule rather than the exception, and that’s partly because consumers seem to prefer it that way. According to research published last year by Vonage subsidiary NewVoiceMedia, 25% of people prefer to have their queries handled by a chatbot or other self-service alternative, and according to Salesforce, roughly 69% of consumers choose chatbots for quick communication with brands.

Directly’s robust API lets clients insert automatic answers mapped to intent into any messaging channel in order to resolve issues in-line and in real-time, while its AI-powered expert answers feature automatically determines which questions are best handled by a network of subject-matter experts, who provide live assistance over channels. Meanwhile, a complementary insights feature automatically shares issues internally to the right stakeholders to work on preventing said issues.

Microsoft worked with Directly to build a trusted network of experts — mainly power users of Excel, the Surface, and other products — to answer questions instead of routing them through an outsourced call center. (The experts receive a cash incentive, typically $2 to $60. Directly gets a 30% cut.) Questions are clustered into topics in space and AI identifies which experts are the top performers on specific topics by polling the wider expert network, asking them to rate the answers. If a particular answer is better than others, it will bubble to the top, and the expert who provided that answer earns more income every time that question is served.

Directly’s growing list of partners and customers include LinkedIn, Airbnb, Autodesk, Samsung, and SAP, which De la Cruz says are saving on average tens of millions of dollars per year thanks to the company’s platform. A larger company can do $10 million in rewards a year, and a mid-sized company can do $1 million in rewards a year, Directly previously told VentureBeat.

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