Kustomer
A New Model For Holistic Customer Engagement

When it comes to defining engagement and growth strategies, deepening the relationship between company and consumer is essential, but the need to improve service delivery and increase personalized engagement are both often trivialized. As a result, companies lose opportunities to drive sales and, even worse, the loyalty of their customers. To stay ahead in the B2C landscape, where competition is rising to unprecedented levels, organizations have to be proactive at not only satisfying their customers’ needs, but also exceeding their expectations, while ensuring their service and support functions are working efficiently. This is the reason why companies look for CEM platforms to gain insight regarding customer interactions and optimizing each touchpoint to drive loyalty and, ultimately, lifetime value.

Enter Kustomer. A promising CEM solution provider with a new model that helps companies engage with their clients holistically and efficiently. Headquartered in New York City, Kustomer was founded by Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel—who lead the company as its CEO and CTO respectively— in 2015, and has quickly risen to prominence.

Until recently, customer service models were inherently transactional, with technology prioritizing inquiries and tickets rather than focusing on the actual customer and improving their overall experience. However, today’s consumers are driving the need for new support and service models as the balance in their relationships with brands have shifted in their favor. With higher expectations around tailored, expedited service, and the belief among consumers that companies should be available to communicate with them across the channel (phone, email, text, social, and chat) that is most convenient for them at that moment, the technology that supported the transactional model of service has quickly become outdated.

And while these legacy support and service solutions have only continued facilitating the traditional transactional model, Birnbaum and Suriel have identified the massive gaps across these solutions in the market, and built a customer management platform to meet consumers on their terms. Birnbaum explains, “Kustomer is the next-generation omnichannel customer management platform for enterprises focused on delivering standout experiences - not ticket resolution.” The platform enables companies to deliver effortless, consistent and personalized service and support through a single timeline view by unifying consumer data from all of a company’s systems and channels. It eliminates the complex and confusing UIs in other systems as well as the need for clunky coding and multiple system searches to get agents the customer information they need.

Personalized, Omnichannel Service and Support

At first glance, the Kustomer platform’s timeline offers a bird’s-eye view of every customer’s history with the brand, from past conversations with customer service to the products they’ve purchased. Having access to all of a customer’s information nested within the timeline allows support teams to be more informed and adopt a personalized approach in addressing inquiries, leading to faster resolution and more efficient (and headache-free) support teams. Moreover, the platform brings the ability to identify opportunities to nurture and engage customers to drive more sales, while also keeping them informed about issues that may impact them and help companies solve problems before their customers even know they have one.

Another feature that differentiates the platform from other providers is its true omnichannel capabilities, which optimize communication by breaking down the siloed support experiences that typically exist between different channels in other solutions. In Kustomer, support agents can fully understand the nature of any inquiry, engage the customer, and continue that conversation within a single, unbroken thread, even if the customer has switched channels during the process.

Information Consolidation at its Finest

The Kustomer platform is able to easily process information from and work with any outside system, including home-grown ones. Whether it’s enriching existing customer data, expanding channel reach, aiding data analysis, or making teams more productive, Kustomer works with all the systems an organization uses.

For support teams, this alleviates a major issue with older CX and CRM solutions that require complicated and expensive implementations which likely involve third-party service providers.

Kustomer is the next-generation omnichannel customer platform for the peoplefirst enterprise

Kustomer is built from the ground up, and integrates seamlessly and securely through a combination of APIs, webhooks, and workflows, unifying customer data from all internal and 3rd-party sources. This creates a holistic view of a customer’s experience with the business to further drive personalized support.

Efficiency through Automation

The Kustomer platform not only ingests internal and external data, but also makes that data fully actionable. Branched, multi-step workflows and business logic make automating even the most complicated process possible. And while Kustomer’s workflows can automate the complex, they are easy to set up, so end users won’t waste valuable development resources customizing technology to meet their needs.

These workflows are designed to expedite more manual service and support processes. For instance, workflows can be built to ensure a particular type of customer is segmented to the appropriate agent or department, or guarantee an inquiry of greater severity is prioritized automatically. Through intelligent automation, the platform ultimately predicts, improves, and augments the customer and agent experience.

Kustomer also features automated conversation routing capabilities to improve first call resolution, decrease handling times, and improve agent productivity. By segmenting inbound traffic based on specific conversation or customer attributes, customers are automatically directed to the right agent based on business priority and the bandwidth of each agent. By maximizing an agent’s overall capacity without overextending his or her workload, companies can also reduce customer wait times.

In a nutshell, Kustomer positions itself as an all-round CEM solution which can easily be a part of every consumer-centric, efficiency-seeking enterprise. The success of one of their clients best exemplifies Kustomer’s capabilities. Birnbaum recounts the story of Away, a travel accessories brand that sought a new customer experience management model that extended beyond any ticketing system. “Before adopting Kustomer, Away team members were navigating between multiple tabs and systems to get the information they required of their customers. After switching to Kustomer, all their consumer data was consolidated and made available within the Kustomer platform, which allowed them to accelerate their ability to answer inquiries and fix complaints effectively, and deliver best-in-class customer experiences.”

Exceeding Expectations

A team consisting of a diverse mix of talent and led by visionary leadership drives Kustomer along its success trajectory. The company employs its “customer first” team during every stage of the sales process, including implementation, tech support, and ongoing product engineering.

Kustomer’s leadership team is well aware of its place in the market as well as their competition. What drives them ahead is the trust they build with their clients. Birnbaum explains, “Every client entrusts us with their proprietary and valuable customer data that holds significant monetizable value. And for that reason, we strive to uphold and continuously improve upon the quality of the services we deliver.”

As Kustomer continues to scale, they aim to grow their client portfolio by targeting larger enterprise companies. The company recently completed a $35 million Series C, and continues to achieve 500 percent growth year-over-year in revenues. And Kustomer is steadily establishing its presence in new markets. “As a HIPAA compliant organization, we have entered the healthcare market already, and have begun to expand to other industry verticals being disrupted by companies that have realized customer experience provides sustainable differentiation,” concludes Birnbaum.