Customer service automation platform Aquant raises $70M

Aquant, a platform leveraging AI to assist buyer service employees, at present introduced that it closed a $70 million sequence C funding spherical led by Qumra Capital, Insight Partners, and Pitango Growth with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Angular Ventures. The capital brings the corporate’s total raised so far to $110 million, and CEO Shahar Chen says it’ll be used to bolster product growth and increase Aquant’s engineering, consumer companies, and go-to-market groups with positions within the U.S., Europe, and Israel.

Customer service groups are more and more embracing AI and automation because the pandemic continues to place a pressure on day-to-day operations. According to Gartner, 37% of service leaders are both piloting or utilizing AI bots and digital buyer assistants, whereas 67% consider they’re high-value instruments within the contact heart. Early adopters of AI options report a 25% enchancment in buyer expertise and accelerated charges of innovation, in addition to increased competitiveness, increased margins, and higher worker experiences, IDC reports.

New York-based Aquant, which was based in 2016 by Chen and Assaf Melochna, goals to offer service leaders, reps, and groups info they want proactively and on-demand. Aquant transforms unstructured information into structured information after which predicts the options for service challenges.

“By offering deep evaluation of an organization’s service information, Aquant is ready to current a full-body well being report that exhibits strengths, weaknesses, and alternative for enchancment,” Chen informed VentureBeat through e mail. “The platform offers a transparent map of a service group. The identical service information additionally helps to supply particular service suggestions, serving to discipline engineers repair the basis explanation for the issue accurately the primary time. From an government standpoint, Aquant helps direct service leaders the place to look, present them what wants consideration, assist them prioritize, assist them develop coaching plans — all which in the end result in higher, extra magical service.”

Making sense of knowledge

There’s an extended checklist of frequent challenges within the buyer service trade, notably in discipline service. In a 2018 survey, the most important concern for managers is making certain that their discipline workforce is working at optimum effectivity and productiveness. An estimated 66% of the workforce makes use of data bases — e.g., on-line FAQs — in contrast with 82% of consumers. That’s why 70% of service organizations consider they’ll be burdened by the data lack of a retiring workforce within the subsequent 5 to 10 years, the Service Council reports.

Aquant seeks to handle the problem by mining information from numerous sources to study manufacturing, utilities, and telecom firms’ distinctive service languages. At a excessive stage, the platform captures the data of subject-matter specialists by extracting insights from information silos like buyer relationship administration platforms and enterprise useful resource planning software program. According to Chen, Aquant takes solely days to study a service language from thousands and thousands of buyer tickets, components catalogs, stock, provide chains, web of issues alerts, and extra.

Aquant’s AI algorithms determine patterns and make selections as they interpret the variations in the way in which that service points are described. The platform then extrapolates context and intent and maps issues to options because it prioritizes technicians’ job schedules based mostly on enterprise targets. For instance, Aquant can predict when buyer complaints are the results of error or environmental components versus product failure. Moreover, the system can mechanically immediate workforce members to reply, recommending options based mostly on cost-effectiveness whereas trying to find anomalies in guarantee claims.

“[Our] platform … maps out the whole lot from worker efficiency to half and asset efficiency and might create real-time buyer danger alerts. Managers, administrators, and VPs can now see very clear connections between their workforce and service efficiency ranges and the way these components contribute to service outcomes,” Chen defined. “[We also provide] clever triage, which transforms tribal data into prescriptive intelligence, enabling name heart brokers and discipline techs to troubleshoot issues. A buyer explains the issue and solutions just a few brief further questions, and our AI then recommends the almost certainly or most cost-effective resolution for the issue.”

Aquant lately launched Service Insights, a software that gives a window into components that influence buyer experiences in addition to suggestions, trade benchmarks, developments, workforce efficiency stats, buyer danger scores, and coaching methods. And in August, the corporate rolled out Intelligent Warranty Audit, which categorizes information to assist guarantee managers course of or reject “high-risk” claims.

“Our clients — service executives — face a serious drawback: a scarcity of expert labor. This drawback is the results of an growing old workforce, an absence of curiosity within the expert trades by youthful generations, increased turnover of Millennial and Gen Z workers, and the acceleration of the labor scarcity attributable to the pandemic,” Chen continued. “Service leaders wrestle to seek out and retain certified service technicians, and, because of this, the standard of service and buyer experiences undergo. Aquant affords an answer that captures and disseminates the data of our shoppers’ most expert workers — in order that new and underperforming workers can have the data to supply nice service experiences each time.”

Aquant’s rivals within the world buyer service automation market embrace Zendesk-backed Cleverly.ai, Kustomer, Directly, Zinier, and to a lesser extent TechSee and CareAR. But the corporate has managed to carve out a distinct segment for itself, with over 30,000 customers throughout clients together with The Home Depot and Siemens Healthineers in industries together with medical gadget, meals gear, capital gear, and industrial automation and equipment manufacturing.

“The most frequent aggressive resolution we face is that many service organizations are trying to construct their very own AI platforms in-house, however that may typically take a number of years and require a whole workforce of knowledge scientists, analysts, and IT integrators,” Chen stated. “Plus, they lack the historic data from different Aquant clients that’s constructed into our information algorithms. Aquant’s AI components in trade data and information and combines that with a service firm’s information, which signifies that our outcomes are in a position to present options based mostly on a bigger dataset and trade context.”

Aquant presently has 90 workers and expects to have over 120 by the tip of the yr.