Chat services such as Slack are gradually taking over the workplace. At the same time, a similar development is taking place when it comes to text messages for communication with consumers. Seattle-based company Zipwhip develops tools for companies to cope with this shift and to automate their work in this area as much as possible.
Today, the startup announced that it has raised 51.5 million dollars in an investment round. With this money it wants to expand its presence in the market as much as possible. The investment round was led by Goldman Sachs, but was also supported by, inter alia, Microsoft’s M12 venture capital arm.
Customer service via SMS
Zipwhip offers a cloud service that allows companies to add text support to the phone numbers they already use for customer support, sales and other consumer functions. The platform processes incoming text messages via direct integrations with major telecom providers. Consumers therefore do not need to install a separate app to interact with a company.
According to Zipwhip himself, his service fills a large gap in the consumer strategy of various companies. Research by the startup itself shows that 87 percent of consumers prefer to communicate with a company via text message rather than e-mail or telephone call. Zipwhip responds to this with its service and is also able to generate more and more automatic answers.
This allows companies to send standard answers to certain keywords. Employees can therefore work quite efficiently and handle multiple requests at the same time. Companies can also build up a collection of templates in the Zipwhip platform in order to be able to answer questions as quickly as possible.
More than 10,000 customers
Zipwhip states that more than 10,000 companies make use of its services. These include Ford Motor, Verizon Communications and ESPN Radio. Most of these customers came on board the platform in the course of 2018. The turnover would therefore have increased by eighty percent compared to the previous year.
Zipwhip will use the money to add more features to its platform and hopes to attract more business parties. Among other things, more extensive integrations with other CRM platforms and external services need to be added. To date, Zipwhip has raised $91 million in investment rounds.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.