LogMeIn today announced plans to acquire Nanorep, a provider of digital self-service technologies, with the goal of broadening its customer engagement capabilities. The purchase price is estimated at $45 million, and under the terms of the deal, LogMeIn will obtain all of Nanorep’s outstanding equity interests.
Based in Herzliya, Israel, Nanorep creates digital tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to simplify online self-service for end users. Among the more than 200 clients using its virtual assistants and chatbots are outfits such as Toys”R”Us, Vodafone, and FedEx. According to the company, its clients see self-service usage of upwards of 90 percent, which helps them improve customer experience by providing a seamless omni-channel journey.
LogMeIn’s solutions, meanwhile, are designed to help businesses offer their customers smarter, more personalized levels of engagement and support. By its own account, the Boston-based vendor powers more than 200 million customer interactions each year, enabling those who have employed its tools to service their customers in real time, thus boosting customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
According to Paddy Srinivasan, LogMeIn’s general manager of customer engagement and support, the company will take advantage of Nanorep’s assets to forward its mission of building out technologies that enable for personalized, conversational, and "human" customer service interactions. It will do so by adding Nanorep's self-service functionality to its Bold360 intelligent customer engagement platform, which was released in early June. Additionally, it will continue to offer Nanorep's technologies on a stand-alone basis.
Srinivasan says that Nanorep stood out to LogMeIn as worthy of acquisition partly because it has employed a practical method with NLP and machine learning (ML), and uses a "supervised approach." "Nanorep is not looking to create a chatbot that will deflect every query," he notes. "Their technology is designed to answer some of the most repetitive queries based on previous history and customer context, but also has a powerful channeling engine that allows for graceful escalation to human agents. They've created a conversational, intent-oriented AI technology that complements the human agent. It's the best of both worlds."
"When LogMeIn launched Bold360," Srinivasan adds, "it set three core pillars that would serve as a road map for the future of the product. The first pillar involved creating a world-class omnichannel engagement solution—which we believe we have and are continuing to grow and add channels [to] all the time. The second was providing a 360-degree view of customer interactions," which the company has accomplished through the product’s “intuitive interface.” The third pillar was to embrace "intelligent automation in everything we do." The company took steps in that direction when it introduced its auto-answer capability, "but the addition of Nanorep is going to significantly shorten our time-to-vision," he notes. "In the longer term, having Nanorep as part of the LogMeIn family provides a natural path for us to leverage that technology even more broadly across our portfolio."