Microsoft Executive Brings Deep Digital Transformation Expertise to the Leader in Digital Customer Service

Glia, a leading Digital Customer Service platform, announced Microsoft Corporate Vice President Phil Sorgen has joined its Board of Directors effective January 7th, 2020. Sorgen is an expert in driving digital transformation for commercial enterprises.

“With rapidly accelerating growth and category creation, Glia has an exciting mission ahead of it,” said Sorgen. “I look forward to lending my knowledge of digital transformation and my experience in helping enterprises capitalize on emerging market opportunities to support Glia in its quest to become the premier Digital Customer Service platform.”

“Phil has a tremendous perspective on how to grow and scale successful technology businesses,” said Dan Michaeli, Co-Founder and CEO at Glia. “Thanks to his experience leading industry-aligned teams in many verticals including financial services, his depth of knowledge around go to market strategy,  and his strength in business consulting, he fully understands what a business like ours needs to be successful. His contribution to the board will be highly valuable as we continue our focused execution.”

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This key addition to the board of directors caps off a 2019 in which Glia had substantial success and growth across the entire enterprise as well as recognition by industry leaders.

• Funding. In March, Glia announced they had raised $20 million in additional funding led by Insight Venture Partners, joined by existing investors. This brought Glia’s total fundraising to $29 million with Insight Venture Partners joining the previous roster of investors such as Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

• Awards. Glia continued its track record of winning key industry awards and recognition at events in the Americas and EMEA, including several best in show awards:
  • Best in Show, Finovate Europe (London, February 2019), marking the 5th time Glia has won Best in Show at a Finovate event
  • Best in Show, Credit Union National Association Governmental Affairs Conference (Washington D.C., March 2019)
  • Best in Show, Finovate Spring (San Francisco, May 2019), marking the 6th time Glia has won Best in Show at a Finovate event
  • Best in Show, Credit Union National Association Technology Council Conference (Chicago, September 2019), marking the 2nd time Glia has won Best in Show at a CUNA event
  • Best in Show, Finovate Spring (New York, September 2019), marking the 7th time Glia has won Best in Show at a Finovate event

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• Product. Glia launched many product features and enhancements to increase functionality and performance in 2019, with two major product additions:
  • Glia’s AI Management module provides the framework to provision, measure, and manage AI-driven Virtual Assistants to converse with customers, and Operator Assistants to guide agents. Virtual Assistants automate the resolution of many customer inquiries with chat and CoBrowsing, and recognize when to hand off to an agent, with full context, for the best possible customer experience
  • Glia Applets provides a unified agent desktop which grants customer service representatives access to their applications in a tabbed interface, and also provides different display modes to accommodate representatives’ styles and workspace. Tabs can be expanded, minimized to simplify CoBrowsing, or popped out and moved around as needed. Agents’ view preferences persist across sessions and are completely context aware.
  • Glia’s SMS Gateway enables organizations to achieve a new level of customer communications. Businesses can reach their customers in the palm of their hands and delight them with interactive engagements, providing their customers the opportunity to seamlessly switch to even richer media such as voice or video with CoBrowsing with just one tap

• Industry Recognition. Glia was highlighted by industry analysts in key industry reports:
  • How To Build A Modern Agent Desktop And Transform Customer Service Experiences (Forrester), by Kate Leggett with Daniel Hong, Sarah Dawson, Peter Harrison
  • The Gartner Customer Service Technology Vendor Guide (Gartner), by Simon Harrison, Olive Huang, Drew Kraus, Melissa Davis, Nadine LeBlanc, Jim Robinson, Steve Blood, Anthony Mullen, Brian Manusama, Jim Davies

• Hiring. Glia more than doubled the team globally across the United States and Estonia, and expanded the executive team with key hires including industry veterans Steven Kaish as SVP of Product Marketing; Phil Brown as SVP of Global Alliances; Parag Rajpal as VP of Finance; and Nathan Meeks as VP of Strategic Initiatives. In addition, Glia moved to new offices in both New York and Tallinn in order to support the organization’s continued scale across all functions, from engineering, to product, to customer solutions, to sales, to marketing

• Re-Brand. Formerly known as SaleMove, the company re-branded as Glia in February 2019. From the ancient Greek for “glue”, Glia are the most numerous cells in the brain that provide physical and nutritional support for neurons. In short, your glia are the infrastructure which allows for all of the communication to take place in the nervous system. Just like the glia in the brain, Glia the company provides the infrastructure for companies to connect with their customers using Messaging, Video, CoBrowsing and AI

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