If you are managing a contact center, your goal everyday is to enrich your customer’s experiences. That is exactly the foundation to which Kustomer built their business. Only in business for seven years now, they are helping organizations build stronger customer relationships and experiences through their interactions.
Enjoy reading their story.
Tell us the Kustomer story.
Kustomer was founded by Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel after seeing a lack of customer service platforms that treated customers as people vs tickets. One of our founders’ mantras is that every decade, technologies need to be reinvented. At the time of Kustomer’s founding in 2015, Salesforce was getting close to being 20 years old. It was time to disrupt it.
Brad and Jeremy decided to create a company to reimagine the customer experience with a modern customer support platform, where the customer was at the center — not the ticket. Wanting to be product and design focused, Brad and Jeremey spent two years in stealth mode, building and honing the product’s capabilities. When Kustomer finally went to market, it took off, tripling its annual recurring revenue, ARR, two years in a row and massively disrupting the industry with its amazing growth.
In Q4 2020, Kustomer signed an agreement to be acquired by Meta. Omnichannel support is now the expectation for customer service, and Kustomer is the only CRM for customer service that enables businesses to manage it successfully.
Outline your product, key features, and benefits.
Kustomer is a top-rated CRM for customer service, helping leading brands deliver modern CX that creates customers for life. Through AI-powered automation, Kustomer scales to meet the needs of contact centers and businesses, enabling companies to deliver effortless, consistent and personalized service and support through a single timeline view. Today, Kustomer is the core platform of some of the leading customer service brands like Skims, Ring, ThirdLove, Glossier and Sweetgreen.
With Kustomer, leading brands are empowered to deliver modern customer service that creates customers for life. Many CX platforms on the market today are ticket-based, meaning they identify the customer as an attribute of an inbound or outbound message and build the communication around that ticket. These systems prioritize the metric of a “done ticket” over a customer relationship, and treat each new interaction as a separate event, handled by different people, across a variety of siloed platforms. In this model, there’s no way to store, share and track the customer’s history and past conversations, so service can seem robotic and non-contextual.
Kustomer helps leading brands deliver a modern customer experience that creates customers for life.
With the Kustomer platform, consumers are helped in whatever manner they choose (whether via live support or self-service) and on any channel they want (whether that’s phone, e-mail, chat or social). As a truly omnichannel CRM, customers are able to switch channels mid-conversation without losing context, and experience personalized, relevant and speedy support, as agents have all the information they need in a single screen. Kustomer allows brands to treat customers like people, not tickets.
What products does it integrate with?
Kustomer currently integrates with more than 60 applications and integrations including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Shopify, Twilio, Gmail, Zapier, Export Buddy, AirCall, Amazon Connect, Ujet, Klaviyo, Calendly, Giphy, Yotpo, Dialpad, Magento, Big Commerce, Gong and more.
To be considered as one of our integration partners, you must share our customer-centric philosophy, target our ideal customer profile, and satisfy a few other business and technology criteria.
What contact center types, sizes, and verticals would receive the most value from it?
The Kustomer CRM is a solution built for companies and contact centers of all sizes. We have customers that include everything from small direct to consumer, DTC, retailers to major travel apps and massive e-commerce brands. For example, Kustomer empowers AvantStay, a brand setting the new standard for short-term rental experiences, to have the relevant context to make more informed and rapid decisions from first customer contact to the end of stay. We also count Kin Insurance, a DTC consumer insurance company for homeowners, as a customer and aid their agents in responding faster without taking on more work.
A variety of brands across many industries like travel, retail and FinTech leverage the Kustomer CRM. Some others that currently use the platform include Hopper, Abercrombie & Fitch, Glovo, Delivery.com and Priority Bicycles.
What environment (e.g., hosted, private cloud) is it available in?
The Kustomer platform is fully hosted within Amazon AWS data centers that offer a comprehensive set of security capabilities and have been ISO 27001 and PCI/DSS Service Provider Level 1 certified, as well as maintains SOC II compliance. All services are hosted within a virtual private cloud exposing only the limited hosts/port mappings required for public application programming interfaces, API, and internal access.
How does your product differ from the competition?
Customers of DTC brands demand a high level of personalized customer service — they expect brands to know them by the sum of their experiences, not one isolated contact. Kustomer’s open API allows customer service organizations to integrate all applications used to service a customer (e.g., return processing, text marketing, etc.) as well as channels (social, email, chat) on which to service them are integrated into a single screen.
The Kustomer platform stands out among other solutions for the comprehensiveness of available customer data and business process automation throughout the omnichannel support platform, making it the first CRM built specifically for modern customer service. With Kustomer IQ, the platform goes even further in helping brands understand their customers’ needs while optimizing business processes and deflecting simple inquiries, making it easier for agents to take action on customer information, and ultimately developing a stronger and more profitable customer relationship.
What is new and upcoming with your product and expected general availability dates?
We look forward to continued innovation that will shape the future of CX and the way brands interact with consumers, on the platforms they use every day. As part of Meta, we will scale our capabilities rapidly, expanding features and ease of use for both small and large businesses alike. We will make announcements regarding specific product updates as they approach their general release dates in the coming months.
We understand that Kustomer is now part of Meta. What will that mean for contact center users?
With complementary capabilities, Kustomer + Meta will help more people benefit from customer service that is faster, richer and available whenever and however they need it – via phone, email, text, web chat or messaging. In particular, Kustomer looks forward to enhancing the messaging experience which is one of the fastest growing ways for people and businesses to engage.
Meta plans to support Kustomer’s operations by providing the resources it needs to scale its business, improve and innovate its product offering, and delight its customers.
How would our readers learn more about your product?
Visit Kustomer.com, Kustomer.com/free-trial and Kustomer.com/demo.