Led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) & Partech
Amsterdam, the Netherlands– March 26, 2020 – Today we announce a $3 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, and Partech, with participation from several angel investors.
Formerly known as Ticketless, Kaizo was started in 2018 by Dominik Blattner, an entrepreneur with over a decade of experience building highly-scalable customer support applications. “In our current social climate, customer support is an integral part of a company’s stability and growth that has embraced remote work to meet the demands of a globalized customer base,” said Dominik Blattner, founder of Kaizo. “With the rise of support teams utilizing a digital workplace, providing standards to measure an agent’s performance has never been more important. KPIs provide these standards, quantifying the success, achievement and contribution of each team member.”
We have already onboarded over five hundred companies and thousands of customer support agents allowing them to leverage AI and gamification to work remotely more effectively and focus on common goals to drive the best possible experience for their customers. The Kaizo platform takes a bottom-up approach, using AI and level-based gamification to actively guide customer support agents towards making a greater impact in their company.
Kaizo enables actionable OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) on an agent level. Our platform matches a client’s performance metrics in real-time with a gamified point system that agents can trigger by achieving personal weekly goals which they set and manage on their own. The product is fully integrated into a team’s existing workflow and gives agents real-time feedback with an AI coach and personal ninja avatar. This point-based gamification element makes it easier than ever for managers to measure agent performance against KPIs, regardless of the external influences of remote work. For agents, it creates a community feeling within the workplace that is engaging and motivating. Over time, this unified, in-game digital work environment increases agent’s engagement, retention and overall performance.
Part of the Kaizo team at our Amsterdam HQ
“We’re excited about Kaizo’s novel approach to applying AI to existing ticket data from platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce to optimize the customer support workflow,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “Using machine learning, Kaizo understands which behaviors in customer service tickets lead to better outcomes for customers and then guides agents to replicate that using ongoing game mechanics. Customer support and service platforms today are failing to leverage data in the right way to make the life of agents easier and more effective. The demand Kaizo has seen since they launched on the Zendesk Marketplace shows agents have been waiting for such a solution for some time.”
With Kaizo, we offer a suite of free and paid tools, enabling agents to self-manage while also digitally engaging with their colleagues. The platform fits seamlessly into their workflow and empowers managers to guide improvement based on performance insights. Its progressive approach, along with its no-hassle download process from Zendesk Marketplace, has made Kaizo one of the top 10 rated customer support apps based on user feedback. Over 500 companies currently use the Kaizo platform, including Truecaller, SimpleSurance, Miro, CreditRepairCloud, Justpark, Festicket and Nmbrs.
Dani Arias, Customer Happiness Manager at CreditRepairCloud said, “With Kaizo, we’ve increased the operational efficiency of our remote team and motivated agents to improve the number of inquiries they handle per hour. As a result, we’ve cut our first reply time by 50% and increased our tickets solved per hour by 30%.”
With this new capital, we will focus on platform enhancement, market expansion and customer retention. We look forward to filling these key roles both at our headquarters in Amsterdam and remotely.
Check out Kaizo app on Zendesk marketplace and try it for free!
