AI-Powered Customer Service Company Simplr Raises $8 Million Series A

AI-Powered Customer Service Company Simplr Raises $8 Million in Series A

Sudipto Ghosh

April 17, 2018

Simplr Will Use Its Series A Funding to Work On A New Combination of Human Power and Machine Learning to Disrupt Customer Service Outsourcing

In an increasingly connected and social media dominated the world, customer service is quickly becoming the key differentiator among e-commerce brands. Consistent, reliable and rapid-fire customer service is a necessary element of any successful business. According to a 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report, 62% of companies don’t respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner and a majority of those companies have less than 100 employees. But, in the booming e-commerce and startup community, most businesses aren’t served by existing outsourced customer service solutions or have the bandwidth and budget for in-house teams. Enter Simplr.

In their Series A round, Simplr unveiled their ambition to provide high growth e-commerce businesses with affordable, flexible and on-demand US-based customer service. The company has raised $8 million from Asurion and its private equity backers. Simplr is a customer service solutions initiative incubated and funded by Asurion, a global leader in customer service with over 300 million customers.

At the time of this announcement, Eng Tan, CEO, Simplr, said, “We often get asked – why aren’t there already established customer service solutions that serve the high-growth e-commerce startup space? The answer is complex and simple at the same time – because it’s hard.”

Eng added, “For us, democratizing customer service is what drove us to build Simplr. We want to empower startups with top-notch, US-based customer service and free entrepreneurs to do what they do best — disrupt conventional thinking, innovate and grow their business.”

AI/Machine Learning: The Engine that Drives Simplr

The premise behind Simplr is simple: rapidly expand the customer service capacities of e-commerce businesses with speed, empathy, and precision. Simplr developed a simple formula that combines knowledgeable, on-demand customer service manpower with machine learning and customized client dashboards that give businesses the ability to invest in a customer service solution that’s high quality, affordable and scalable.

“We’re looking at a multi-billion-dollar market that’s currently underserved by outsourced customer solutions providers. Simplr is using human expertise and technology to deliver world-class customer service and tools that help e-commerce startups across industries like apparel, tech, and food efficiently scale their operations,” said Eng Tan, CEO of Simplr.

Simplr Delivers a Right-Sized, Pay-What-You-Use Model to Startups

Existing customer service outsourcing is often too expensive, takes too much time and resources to onboard and requires contracts with large volume. Simplr’s approach is designed to meet startups where they are and deliver a right-sized, pay-what-you-use model to tackle their most pressing problems. First, the Simplr team analyzes and evaluates a company’s customer service approach, history and messaging to get a complete understanding of the brand needs and voice.

Simplr then leverages, trains and supports a vigorously screened and on-demand team to respond to customer inquiries; the expert staff capacity is augmented with Simplr’s unique blend of machine learning and intelligent platforms that vet inquiries and give experts the resources they need while helping each customer.

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