Customer service platform Kustomer has just secured $40 million in funding for its omnichannel service platform. The solution pulls in data from different service channels and apps that businesses use to deliver customer service on a single platform, enabling agents to bring greater context to customer relationships. What makes it unique, according to cofounder and CEO Brad Birnbaum, is that it’s designed with the goal of making communication between agents and customers easier and more straightforward, as he recently explained to Forbes:
“We observed over the years the deficiencies in many of the products of today and we knew that when we created our next generation platform that we had to solve all of those problems. To us omnichannel is a single threaded discussion about a topic that spans all of the channels that you’d want to communicate with your customer on.”
In practice, Kustomer’s omnichannel experience promises that, for example, the same agent can process a return and place a new order for a customer all in one exchange. It sounds straightforward, but in reality, businesses typically have to transfer these types of calls across service and sales departments to perform the different functions.
With the new funding, Kustomer’s aim is to bring in more AI functions to automate simple repetitive CRM tasks, which the company hopes will attract larger clients. Tiger Global led the company’s Series D funding round along with participation from previous investor Battery Ventures.
The announcement rounds out a busy week for the customer service space. Earlier this week Zendesk, a key Kustomer competitor, announced its acquisition of Smooch to extend its ability to offer support via messaging apps such as WhatsApp. But Birhaum isn’t too worried about Zendesk, he explained to TechCrunch:
“We are most proud of the fact that we do omnichannel really well. On our platform you have a threaded conversation, whereas on others the same input might resolve in four separate tickets. In many ways, from a product perspective, I think Zendesk is chasing us, but our product is about 10 years younger.”