As we are all aware, 2020 was a year like no other. We saw virtually the entire business world take a monumental hit from a plummeting global economy and a universal shift towards the digitization of markets and workplaces.
With nearly all markets becoming more fierce and even more power being granted to the consumer, more and more companies turned to customer support as the key to a competitive advantage.
Whilst the market has been hot for a long time, investing in customer support has often been thwarted by its image as a ‘cost-center’. Perhaps cemented by the panic of the pandemic, companies are now finally realizing the immense value (monetary and non) establishing a relationship between customer and company holds. Lucky for them the world now has the tech to facilitate.
This value was highlighted by a number of unprecedented investments that gave birth to the intersection of big tech and the customer support industry. In December, Facebook acquired customer service CRM platform, Kustomer, for $1bn. This was followed, earlier this month with the acquisition of SparkCentral - a digital customer service platform - by social scheduling giant, Hootsuite.
2020 was the year of survival. Companies learnt a lot about the competitive power of customer support and will surely act on these learnings in 2021. Not only to invest in their processes, but to leverage available tech and approaches to rebuild their support workflow for this next generation. The generation we now commence with remote, digitized and data conscious priorities for growth.Christoph Auer-Welsbach, CEO at Kaizo
Amidst this support-driven shift, an increasing amount of companies are investing in creative approaches to improve their customer support. Companies are looking at performance management platforms to optimize their teams from the inside out. This shift lead to Kaizo’s 200% growth in it's global customer base last year.
The pandemic affected companies in different ways. Some industries saw growth - B2B SaaS, online services, delivery, ecommerce - and some saw a heavy decline - B2C, hospitality, travel.
Kaizo’s mission was (and still is) to empower support teams on either end of the spectrum to make the most of their time and resources. Helping create efficient, engaging and productive digital work environments through data-conscious performance management.
Unified solution: Kaizo developed a product that consolidates all of the tools and functions a customer support team could need into one, unified performance management platform. Leveraging teams’ data simplifies workflows by eliminating the need for multiple solutions, insulating a support team’s operations and accelerating efficiency.
Gamified digital workplace: Kaizo introduced gamification into the workplace of hundreds of customer support teams. This facilitated a new level of connectivity and engagement between colleagues amidst the global shift to remote work. Moreover, it enabled an unparalleled answer to employee skill development and performance improvement across the board.
Empowered teams: Kaizo provides a unique bottom-up solution to performance management. The transparency of data has allowed for a more even distribution of operations between management and employees. This has helped avoid micro-task management and staff turnover by promoting a productive, scalable workplace and actionable operational management.
📈 Raising $3 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Gradient Ventures and Partech
🤖 Being named on Forbes list of Top 25 machine learning startups to watch in 2020
As more companies around the globe begin to recognize the power of customer support, they will invest more into their departments and teams will grow. However, scalability doesn’t come without its challenges, especially whilst most workplaces are still WFH.
One of biggest challenges for businesses over the coming years will be to manage the performance of a growing digital workforce of more than 85 million customer support employees, the largest remote-working sector.
In 2021, Kaizo will continue to provide and develop the world’s leading workforce performance management (WPM) platform for customer support teams. We hope to accelerate our bottom-up approach to actionable operational management by empowering support agents through initiatives of recognition and extended autonomy.
Through our creative implementation of gamification, AI and real-time data processing, Kaizo will continue to transform the digital workplace into one of heightened efficiency, engagement and productivity.
About Kaizo
Kaizo, the top-rated, unified, and actionable Workforce Performance Management (WPM) platform covering the entire customer support life-cycle.