Companies are increasingly turning to chat and chatbots to enhance their customer service experiences by providing ongoing access to support for customers. However, early efforts for complete automation resulted in frustration among customers because their concerns were not properly addressed in many chat interactions. Businesses now use a hybrid approach that reduces the volume of cases for customer service reps by automating the initial interaction with chat interactions and then the introduction of a human layer. Loris is an AI-powered communication software platform that empowers customer service agents with real-time support during digital interactions (email, chat, SMS). Rapid use to support remote work has also opened up a global talent pool for customer support options and in many cases, reps are talking to customers from different cultures and backgrounds. . Loris integrates with leading customer service platforms such as Zendesk, LivePerson, Twilio, and Salesforce as an automated layer that educates reps by adding context, empathy, and goal-based language understanding. The platform will improve agents ’productivity in a matter of weeks while leaving the customer with a positive brand experience. Loris’ solution is completely code -free and can be integrated in minutes. The company, founded in 2018, is seeing traction with e-commerce partners, marketplaces, and financial services. Platform partners see a 50% increase in the number of conversations that can be handled simultaneously (concurrency), a 20% increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT), and a 25% decrease in time spent in interactions (handle time).
AlleyWatch reached Loris CEO Etie Hertz to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, bringing total fund proceeds to $ 19.1M, and much, much more…
Who are your investors and how much do you earn?
Loris, the conversational AI software that helps human agents in real-time make customer support more human, responsive, and measurable, has announced its $ 12M Series A funding round. The series is led by Bow Capital, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures and current investors Floodgate at Vertex Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service Loris offers.
Loris brings better conversations to the world by allowing brands to measure human experiences with their customers. Loris is an AI communication platform that guides customer support agents in real-time during digital conversations (chat, SMS, email, etc.) with empathy techniques and goal -based language suggestions that enhance productivity metrics and positive customer outcomes. Loris code-free software is integrated with most customer service platforms (Zendesk, LivePerson, Salesforce, etc.) and gives business leaders a dashboard view of conversational insights to inform the product, service, and promotional decisions.
What inspired Loris ’start -up?
Fast-growing startups have reached out to say they are seeing significant change in the way they communicate with their customers. In particular, moving away from telephone conversations and digital channels such as messaging, chat, email and SMS. Simultaneously with this increasing demand for digital communications support has generated challenges for brands to maintain a balance of quality and efficiency-for example, maintaining consistent tone, empathy, and accuracy of responses while being fast. they have expanded their customer support workforce to meet demand.
How is Loris different?
Most AI companies in the industry tend to route customers to self-service with automated responses; Loris is committed to guiding human agents every step of the way.
Most natural language processing (“NLP”) software can identify topics, some can detect generic emotion in messages. Loris combines NLP with an in-depth understanding of the customer support domain and dynamically determines customer intent, monitors aspect-based sentiment throughout the conversation in real-time, and predicts the positive or negative outcome of a conversation.
Loris is the only AI company that combines all of these features with a code-free solution that integrates with most current customer support platforms.
What market is Loris targeting and how big is it?
Loris ’clients are digitally native, fast -growing companies – mainly in the eComm, marketplace, and fintech sectors.
What is your business model?
Software as a service
What are your post-COVID office plans?
Loris has a hybrid working model for local teams, with two offices, one in New York and one in Tel Aviv with local employees coming into the office for 1-2 days or more, based on their preferences. Additionally, we have a growing completely remote worker.
What is the funding process?
The fundraising process is always busy with unexpected turns along the way.
We operate in a very interesting and growing space that has garnered interest from most of the top-tier VC community. We are fortunate that we have met the leading investors in the country and find the right partners for us.
What are the biggest challenges you have faced while raising an investment?
Investors typically look for companies within their investment thesis. While conversational AI is a broad category on the list of many venture capitalists, in many ways we are making a sub-category in this space from scratch. There has been tremendous progress in natural language processing that allows us to do things that have been relatively unimaginable lately. For investors who engage in AI and NLP and don’t spend a lot of time in our world, sometimes there may be a slight learning and education curve required during the investor presentation-which is difficult when meeting times are limited. .
What factors about your business prompted your investors to write the check?
In other words, we are a growing company in an increasingly exploding market. The first versions of our product gained traction with some of the best known and fastest growing brands in the country.
What milestones do you plan to achieve in the next six months? Where do you see the company going now in the near term?
One of the features that strongly resonates with our clients is our real-time goal classification of their customers (the topics and keywords associated with end user messages). We are working to make the process of training and deploying these models faster.
And in addition to customer intent, we’ve created a best-in-class emotion classification system that delivers real-time understanding of customer emotion (a five-point scale of negative, neutral or positive feelings as they write to customer support agents). Over the next few months, we plan to update our platform with aspect-based sentiment detection. No other company to date has brought this technology to the mass market before. It is reserved for large enterprise companies, with teams of in-house data scientists.
And in addition to customer intent, we’ve created a best-in-class emotion classification system that delivers real-time understanding of customer emotion (a five-point scale of negative, neutral or positive feelings as they write to customer support agents). Over the next few months, we plan to update our platform with aspect-based sentiment detection. No other company to date has brought this technology to the mass market before. It is reserved for large enterprise companies, with teams of in-house data scientists.
The combination of our focus on integrating customer purpose with understanding emotion and delivering an easy to use configuration system to our users is very powerful. It will continue to enhance the sophistication of the language suggestions that Loris presents to users, and provide a dashboard of integrated insights to CX managers to improve their policies, products, and promotions in ways that will improve to customer results and reduce churn.
So our 6 month goal is that a CX manager can come up with an idea of how to handle a particular type of customer request to better test it and train agents to use it on the same day. For example, if you have a specific avoidance or churn avoidance process that agents must follow when trying to retain a customer, we can predict the appropriate time to use this workflow and test the effectiveness of others. different approaches. This is a huge improvement compared to the tools and processes they use today to implement this type of change, and could deliver an immediate impact as we saw in one of our pilot users of this functionality-Slice.
“We originally went to Loris with a mission to improve our agent productivity and to ensure that even newer agents can climb faster,” said Enis Haskaj, Director of Operations at Slice, who is an early uses Loris technology. “Appeasements are not an initial focus. However, the impact Loris has shown in just six weeks has been incredible, with a 36% reduction in credits issued and hundreds of thousands of dollars expected in savings for our business. We now plan to further launch Loris into additional channels. “
What advice can you give to companies in New York that don’t have a new capital injection into the bank?
There is a lot of strategy variation on how many runways a company has and how much they have left to prove to achieve their next round. In addition, with the market rotation, most should consider a longer fundraising process. People who have raised money should go back to the date and milestones they need to figure out how to best get there.
Starting discussions and building relationships with investors that may be relevant is likely to happen sooner. Depending on how time constrained they are, operators may want to explore venture debt and shift their sales moves to prepaid (with a discount) to boost their cash flow if possible.
What is your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
Lola Taverna in Soho is probably the outdoor place I’ve enjoyed the most since COVID started.
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