Customer Service Automation Startup Lang Lands $15M
05/12/22, 12:00 PM
Money raised
$15 million
The customer experience is one of the most important focus areas for businesses. According to PwC, among all customers, 73% point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality. But the pandemic increased the workload of support teams, making it more difficult to hire customer service agents and keep the attrition low while maintaining a high bar for customer experience. The average contact center turnover rate is as high as 45% — at least twice that of other departments.
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The startup partners with vendors developing frontend and backend customer service automation products, such as business intelligence tools, to sell Lang as a complementary offering. [Moreover, the platform] becomes the system of record for all insights across unstructured customer experience data, providing a centralized source for insights across disparate sources,” Penalva said. “To date, our biggest competition for budget share has not been other platforms but rather displacing the status quo: the hiring or outsourcing of more customer experience agents.”It’s early days for Lang, but the company counts Stitch Fix, Ramp, Hippo Insurance, and Freshly among its customers. Lang, which today announced that it raised $10.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nava Ventures (bringing its total raised to $15 million), uses AI to extract concepts from customer requests in existing help desk platforms like Zendesk and Intercom. Using Lang, companies can visually group concepts identified in customer support data and set up automations that trigger with specific labels (e.g., respond to questions about package deliveries with boilerplate text). For example, he said, Lang uses AI systems tailored for particular customers’ domains (e.g., retail, food services, healthcare) to recognize industry jargon and adapt to changes like emerging customer support issues.