Hey Hackers, We're proud to introduce Algomo - an platform with the goal of revolutionising customer service! We are building an AI platform that helps companies of any size fully automate their customer service in 100+ languages, easily and affordably. AI Our chatbots are capable of sourcing data from various inputs like URLs, PDFs and Notion pages and in under 5 minutes are able to answer any question a customer has! We’ve been nominated for HackerNoon and this is our interview. Startups of the Year Vote for us today! https://hackernoon.com/startups/europe/europe-london-england-uk My Role My name is Charis Sfyrakis, I hold a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and I am an alumnus of Entrepreneur First, HSBC (where I built their global chatbot framework), Barclays & BNP Paribas. I am the CEO here at Algomo where I focus on leading the Algomo team; from helping our business development team reach as many people as possible to reviewing our tech team’s progress, I spend my days elevating and inspiring my employees whilst making sure that we are on track to achieve our goals and bring our vision to life! How We're Disrupting/Improving the Customer Service/Chabot Industry These days, customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service. One poor experience can wipe away any loyalty, with over $75 billion in revenue being lost by companies as a result of bad customer service and 9/10 customers saying that they have switched to a competitor following a bad customer experience. Similarly, despite $1.3tn being spent on customer service calls every year, 91% of customers prefer self help tools over calling a help centre and 9/10 customers say quick responses to inquiries are important when deciding what company to buy from. Chatbots are usually used solely for simple queries, and thus fail to consider the rest of the customer journey - resulting in low market penetration, lost customers and low CSAT scores for firms. In addition, 7/10 customers prefer companies that support their native language whilst just 28% of users receive support in their language, and 87% of consumers who don’t understand English won’t even consider buying from an English website. For other monolingual AI tools, every language requires building a separate AI, making it expensive and resource-intensive. Training a bot takes ages, as one needs to provide a lot of training data across multiple languages. And that’s where we come in. We are utilising the cutting-edge technology of generative AI to build the ultimate customer service platform. We pride ourselves on the efficacy and simplicity of our chatbots - enabling 45% of customer support interactions to be resolved through automation with a 92% model accuracy, all of which can be set up in under 5 minutes, in over 100 languages. Standing Out from The Crowd At Algomo, we know that being successful in a market as hot as AI customer service will require being the best at what we do and allowing our product to speak for itself. We’re initially targeting companies in low-resource languages - which is an untapped market - and we have bundled 3 traditionally separate products (AI, localisation and LiveChat) to create a truly unique product, which outperforms competitors in multilingual capabilities and ease of setup. Our platform offers AI and live chat in 109 languages without the need for translations and seamless transition between all languages within the same chat. Also, our customers can build a bot using just a URL and integrate all internal documents with a click of a button. We also top the charts in terms of fitting into the existing set-up of our customers, as our platform enables them to connect to existing tools such as Notion, Hubspot and Slack and reply to customer queries from email or Slack. Our product is also optimised for SMEs (not just corporates, as compared to other providers), so our increased accessibility sets us apart even more. We know that putting customers first is crucial when building a startup, and we believe that our product is suited to their needs better than everyone else. Our Predictions/Thoughts on the Customer Service Industry in 2023 ChatGPT has changed the world, expanding our beliefs about what technology is possible of doing. After Open AI’s brainchild reached 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, it has officially been declared the fastest-growing app in internet history. For a number of years, many firms have already been using AI to resolve millions of customer inquiries. But now ChatGPT’s powerful communication skills are being combined with the ability to integrate into commercial systems like internal knowledge bases and CRMs, with firms seeing customer requests being resolved end to end at the same level as human agents. The customer service industry is currently facing the lowest satisfaction ratings in decades due to a shortage of agents and growing demand, so the use of LLMs will be a major topic for companies trying to earn back customer loyalty in 2023. Over the last few years, contact centres have increasingly utilised AI to deal with common requests such as billing and account management, and this trend will extend into 2023. This has helped to diminish wait times and free agents to spend more time on revenue-generating issues, with cost saving estimates of more than $80 billion by 2026. Despite the immense benefits of leveraging LLMs in a firm’s customer service strategy, they do not come without risks. The main one is hallucinations, where an answer is given that is not actually accurate. As companies see customer support as a chance to repair any damage to its reputation in the eyes of a customer, giving them an incorrect answer to a query is the last thing the company wants. That is why at Algomo we will be constantly working throughout 2023 to limit these occurrences in our chatbots, to ensure that the huge advantages of this new technology can be harnessed by all firms without apprehension. What word defines the state of the Customer Service Industry in 2023? The word that we would use to define the state of the customer service chatbot industry is transforming. Facing consumers who are increasingly seeking instant gratification, with TikTok counting approximately 1.7 billion users worldwide in 2022 (up by over 66 percent compared to 2020), and with increasing digital penetration in developing economies with previously underserved languages - as the next billion internet users will primarily come from economically fast-growing emerging and developing nations - it is essential that customer service keeps up. These shifts in customer personas must be catered to if firms want to attract and retain customers to keep their businesses thriving. Thus, the move towards the automation of customer inquiries leveraging AI technology is becoming more and more essential, granting adopting firms a competitive advantage over those who do not. Furthermore, multilingual capabilities are becoming necessary if a firm wants to grow and cater to the wide array of increasingly digitally savvy consumers from around the world. In these times of great change, at Algomo we have spent countless hours evolving our product to position ourselves to help companies best cater to the modern consumer. We would love to get your support to help us do more! Why we decided to participate in HackerNoon's Startup of the Year awards We wanted to take part in HackerNoon’s Startup of the Year awards this year as we wanted to show the world the progress that we have been making. So far, we have created a full-fledged solution and launched a beta version of our product - and it works! We have gained 25 customers and 100 Monthly Active Users (MAUs) since our launch in June 2023, and we are just getting started! We hope to develop our tool-calling capabilities, such as with Shopify, and extend the presence of AI in more of the customer interaction process. It is an exhilarating time here at Algomo as we are going from strength to strength, improving our product to better serve our customers every day, and we hope that you are as excited as we are! Final Thoughts Having received grants from Innovate UK, Algomo is clearly being recognised for its importance in progressing the use of AI to the wider economy. Using cutting-edge technology and with an outstanding team, we are confident in our ability to make the interaction between companies and customers as smooth and efficient as possible. We hope that you can help us on our mission! Vote for us today! https://hackernoon.com/startups/europe/europe-london-england-uk
