One of the most interesting topics today for growing and large companies is how to continue to provide good service at scale when recruiting service representatives is a challenge that is time-consuming and expensive. The Israeli startup Loris.ai believes that this challenge can be solved with the help of an AI-based system, which will help service representatives, shorten the treatment time, and allow each representative to handle the most applicants at the same time.
Assisting customer service personnel
Loris.ai developed a No-Code product that companies embed in their systems for customer service personnel who use CRM systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk or LivePerson. The system, which uses NLP algorithms developed by the company, assists those customer service people in real-time and provides the managers with insights about customers and conclusions for future calls - based on the purpose and tone of the call.
Loris analyzes the messages in the conversation, classifies the purpose and sentiment in each message, and uses historical information and scenarios that have been entered into the system ahead of time. The system, Loris explains, predicts the next step the representative needs to take in a conversation to promote it in the best way and with a relatively quick response time. In addition, Loris analyzes all calls and generates insights into representative performance and customer satisfaction for managers, so they can see what works more and what works less, and where the company can improve.
In a conversation with Geektime, the company's CEO and one of the founders, Etie Hertz, explains that although the company sounds like a competitor to the Israeli mega-unicorn Gong and other large companies, this is not the case. “Gong, Zoom Info, Microsoft and even Salesforce focus on the world of sales, specifically in voice sales calls. Their product provides insights to executives about sales calls in the organization, but it does not give real-time advice that helps salespeople. Loris works in the field of customer support through text, where conversations are very different from sales conversations– they are emotional, sometimes frustrating to the customer (as they expect an immediate, personal, and empathetic response), and can leave them with a negative experience that will damage the company's brand." The technological challenges, according to Hertz, are in providing the text suggestions, tailored to tone and context, to a service representative, in less than a second. Hertz says that these are completely different challenges from the things that companies like Gong do.
Loris was established in 2018, and it employs about 30 people in New York and in their development center in Israel, which is managed by the company's VP of Development Ron Schwartz. Today (Tuesday) Loris announced the completion of a $12 million funding round led by the Bow Capital Fund and the American software company ServiceNow. Existing investors like Floodgate and Vertex Ventures also participated in the round. Before this round, Loris had raised $7.1 million in Seed funding from various investors, including former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Floodgate, Homebrew and Kapor Capital.
