Customer service is the most important relationship between companies and their customers, as this determines the level of loyalty and the permanence of the customer as a fixed buyer. Due to their customers’ frustration, Ted Mico, the CEO of Thankful, and Evan Tann started their Venice, California-based company (2018).
Mico told TechCrunch: “Companies will offer you a chatbox, but no value and a very time-consuming method, and we thought we could change that. There were statistics that I read in the media articles that customer service was a $ 350 billion business, a huge total addressable market, but it’s a disaster. We also read that we spend about 43 days of our life dealing with customer services. Well, Thankful is here to give you back three weeks of your life. “
Customer service is traditionally seen as the last car on the train in business, but Thankful believes it should be the engine. In this sense, companies spend too much money on marketing to get customers’ attention, but they do not focus on keeping the customer by giving them the help they need in case they have any questions or concerns.
This is one of the business paradigms that Thankful wants to change completely. After being founded, this company spent more than two years developing Artificial Intelligence customer service software. Mico called it “the application layer at the top of the help desk,” created to handle large volumes of customer inquiries through whatever written channel a customer wishes to use, such as email, network. Social, chat, text messages, etc. This platform has processed and learned from more than 30 million customer service tickets so far.
Additionally, it has three products: a support agent that helps people solve problems by intelligently routing and suggesting responses, giving you 40% more efficiency. The second is an AI agent who manages the entire process, reduces the time until the first response, and solves up to 50% of the queries by himself. The third is the Thankful analytics, which is just beginning to provide data on customer reviews.
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Final words
Over 4 years, Mico said he has quietly selected a list of his 50 most successful clients. This list includes brands like Untuckit, FabFitFun, and MeUndies.
Additionally, during this time, this company has experienced year-on-year growth of 400%. Thankful closed a new round of Series A financing of $ 12 million to continue meeting that demand. Joining Alpha Edison are Bonfire, Ten-One-Ten, Greycroft, Omega, and Miramar. Along with an unannounced $ 3 million, that gives the company a total of $ 15 million in funding.
The company is the latest to go after customer service, which is also attracting venture capital and mergers and acquisitions. For example, companies like Sanas, Zendesk, Level AI, and Good call have made headlines in recent months.
