2024 is a different world than 2021
The world has changed significantly since we first started buidling Teleperson in 2021. This was before ChatGPT and the hurried birth of Large Language Models (LLMs) which demonstrated at a blistering pace how machines can pass the once-daunting Turing Test.
There’s no doubt that LLMs have become particularly important in the realm of customer service, since companies are increasingly deploying LLMs (e.g., third-party chatbots that incorporate generative AI into their offerings) or building LLMs trained on internal data. As LLMs evolve, the percentage of customer service requests that can be handled through self-service, 24/7, while promising greater customer delight will inexorably expand. And the frustration of dealing with people will lessen as the need for people lessen with it.
While in Tokyo last month I spoke with an entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist who noted the eventual—or inevitable—applications of AI in reducing customer pain and current friction across the customer service journey. He was right. The timing may be the thing though (as a recent article from the WSJ found); AI may not be living up to its hype, even as there seems to be a natural ceiling we’ve already hit in the world of LLMs or as OpenAI attains an eye-watering valuation of $157B.
We welcome—indeed, are working to catalyze—this sea change in an AI-enhanced customer service landscape. As in other sectors like healthcare and finance there are multiple tasks and processes that should be automated and fall to the realm of AI agents.
Despite OpenAi representing, in effect, a Black Swan event in customer service AI, the impact of gen AI was not, writ large, necessarily surprising. It’s obvious that technology was always going to grow by leaps and bounds and self-service account for a larger share of customer interactions. LLMs will also get cheaper (just as the cost of training LLMs has plummeted), and more companies will adopt them in their customer service needs (so will we). None of this changes Teleperson’s fundamental argument: customer service has evolved around the needs of companies, not the customers they serve.
The value of a dedicated portal that unifies the customer service experience and creates a conversational, contextual, uniform, and effortless experience is more important than ever.
If anything, the wide applications of LLMs have created yet another hurdle between companies and their customers, a layer that does nothing to build a differentiated level of customer loyalty precisely because such applications of LLMs are increasingly ubiquitous. Because costs to train LLMs are dropping – and barriers to entry are evaporating – more and more companies will offer them, which means LLMs—like most other technologies—will become table stakes, a commodity with little incremental value in building stronger ties with customers even as customer expectations for effortless customer service grow.
Closing $510K Seed Raise
In September we signed our term sheet for $500K with Madison, WI-based The Winnow Fund. We are thrilled and humbled to be part of Winnow’s portfolio (as well as within the growing portfolio of our first investor, XRC Ventures) and excited about leveraging this capital to expand on our products and feature sets, current and envisioned!
With the funding from Willow, we will be able to:
- Further our vision for the consumer application in building a truly effortless customer service experience for 100% of the companies and brands one shops with
- Launch the Teleperson Connect platform, a public-facing application which leverages the call tree intelligence and other company information for people seeking to contact that specific company (it will help serve as an entry point for new users to Teleperson as well)
- Launch our B2B product strategy, which includes a premium insights page, and serves as a platform to launch new services (e.g, advertising, surveys, etc.)
- Kick off our company-customer flywheel
We’ve come a long way and have a much, much longer road ahead! In my signature I change the quote I use in my emails to one by Buckminster Fuller (among other things, architect and futurist):
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
If interested in learning about how we’re building customer services’ tomorrow, join our beta here and feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or by phone at (727) 999.0544
Thank you for you!
Jesse, CEO, Co-founder
