Skip to main content

Stonly grabs $3.5 million to make customer support more interactive

Stonly is building a service for customer support teams so that they can share step-by-step guides to solve the most common issues. The startup just raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Accel with business angels also participating, such as Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and PeopleDoc founders Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse.

The startup isn’t building a chatbot for customer support — chatbots usually don’t understand what you mean and you end up contacting customer support anyway. Stonly believes that scripted guides with multiple questions work much better than both chatbots and intimidating knowledge bases.

But the company is well aware that it isn’t going to replace Zendesk or Intercom overnight. That’s why a Stonly guide is a module that you can embed in your existing tools. The startup currently supports Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Front.

This way, if somebody contacts you on Front or Intercom, you can reply with a Stonly guide to help your users solve their own issues (at least if it’s a common issue). Stonly is also launching its own more traditional knowledge base powered by Stonly guides so that your client can access common questions through a chat widget.

Putting together a Stonly guide doesn’t require any technical skills. After defining the steps, you can write text, add images, videos and buttons in a web interface. Stonly also supports translations.

And it’s been working well for the startup’s first clients. For instance, Dashlane noticed a 25% decrease in opened tickets for their most frequent issues after using Stonly. Other clients include Devialet, Happn and Calendly.

With today’s funding round, the startup is expanding to the U.S. with a new office in New York and David Rostan joining as head of revenue — he was previously VP of Sales and Marketing at Calendly.



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2PmgMKc

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Gates steps down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy

In an announcement on Friday, Microsoft revealed that company co-founder Bill Gates has decided to step down from his role on its Board of Directors in order to focus on his philanthropic efforts at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This is Gate’s biggest change to his role at Microsoft since stepping down as company chairman in February 2014. According … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2We90Gu

World Economic Forum launches Global AI Council to address governance gaps

The World Economic Forum is creating a series of councils that create policy recommendations for use of things like AI, blockchain, and precision medicine. Read More from VentureBeat http://bit.ly/2EKBjD4

A Mini USB Keyboard That Isn’t A Keyboard

A useful add-on for any computer is a plug-in macro keyboard, a little peripheral that adds those extra useful buttons to automate tasks. [ Sayantan Pal] has made one, a handy board with nine programmable keys and a USB connector, but the surprise is that at its heart lies only the ubiquitous ATmega328 that you might find in an Arduino Uno. This isn’t a USB HID keyboard, instead it uses a USB-to-serial chip and appears to the host computer as a serial device. The keys themselves are simple momentary action switches, perhaps a deluxe version could use key switches from the likes of Cherry or similar. The clever part of this build comes on the host computer, which runs some Python code using the PyAutoGui library. This allows control of the keyboard and mouse, and provides an “in” for the script to link serial and input devices. Full configurability is assured through the Python code, and while that might preclude a non-technical user from gaining its full benefit it’s fair to say that ...