Inner buyer assist platforms are shifting from platforms like e-mail ticketing techniques and chat to channels like Slack, Microsoft Groups, and even Discord. However with Slack, for example, in a position to host a whole lot of channels, the entire thing can turn out to be fairly unwieldy.
Plain, out of the UK, thinks it has the reply. Its API-first platform consolidates all these communication channels, permitting companies to streamline their assist.
“It means you may actually speak to your clients wherever they’re,” CEO Simon Rohrbach instructed TechCrunch over a name.
It may additionally do chat and e-mail in the identical manner {that a} conventional Assist Desk will, corresponding to ZenDesk or Intercom, but additionally energy Slack, Microsoft Groups, or Discord through one UI.
“It’s simply actually quick to make use of. Folks actually love utilizing it, and it has all the normal assist performance, metrics round SLAs, response occasions, and so forth,” mentioned Rohrbach.
“We see this large shift taking place from assist being actually siloed, to assist working along with buyer success and engineering and all the opposite groups actually carefully. And we energy that inner collaboration as properly,” he added.
The startup has now raised $15 million in a Sequence A funding spherical led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from Index Ventures and Join Ventures.
The funding will probably be partly used to determine its first U.S. workplace in San Francisco.
Plain was based by Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. The 2 beforehand labored at Deliveroo from the early days, with Rohrbach main Deliveroo’s 40-person content material, analysis, and design staff, whereas Vagni labored on design techniques and inner tooling.
Prospects for Plain embrace firms like Sanity, Laravel, Stytch, and Raycast.
In an announcement, Neeraj Agrawal, a Battery Ventures basic companion, mentioned: “B2B assist is shifting into this new period of collaboration and AI.”
Nonetheless, Plain isn’t the one participant within the enterprise of aggregating these buyer assist channels. Within the US there may be additionally Thena and Pylon.
Final 12 months, Pylon landed $17 million in funding to construct a full-service B2B customer support platform, in a spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from present traders Normal Catalyst, Y Combinator and different unnamed angels. It now has over 250 clients.
In the meantime, Thena has raised over $7 million and included Lightspeed and First Spherical Capital as traders.
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