According to a recent article in Xconomy, customer service is taking on new and exciting forms. Putting together a full customer support team is so expensive that it’s out of reach for most small businesses. Often the choice for small companies and startups is to pile all outreach onto a single individual, who can no longer do his or her core job. Those are the companies TalkDesk is targeting with its customer support tool.
TalkDesk lets businesses set up a customer support center in minutes, all from a browser. When a call is placed to a customer service number, that person’s information is automatically pulled up in a browser window along with call history and any information that may help resolve their problems. The real genius of TalkDesk is its interoperability with popular customer relationship management services (CRMs) such as Salesforce and Zendesk. With a clever use of their APIs, TalkDesk pulls customer information from Salesforce, Olark and other business tools, so users can quickly see if the caller has outstanding tickets using these other tools.
“When you have all the information about the customer — a 360 degree view of the customer — you can better take care of his problems,” TalkDesk co-founder Tiago Paiva told VentureBeat. “You don’t even have to ask his name.”
TalkDesk also pulls in information from sites such as Linkedin and Twitter, which might seem strange at first, until you consider how valuable it might be to know if you’re talking to a customer who is trashing your product on popular social media sites.
Co-founders Paiva and Cristina Fonseca of Portugal have been working on web applications for a number of years, but their journey to the U.S. came in a flash. They were notified one day before this year’s Twiliocon that they were selected to present, and they were subsequently chosen as the winners. The duo were admitted into the current class of the 500 Startups accelerator and had to return to Portugal to get their visa situation in order before returning to California to get cranking on their company.
The two have been so busy building their product since arriving in the U.S., that they’ve not even had the chance to buy themselves cell phones. This is especially funny given the fact that their whole product revolves around helping other businesses provide customer support over the phone.
“When you come to Silicon Valley you have to focus a lot on raising money, and maybe because we are from Europe we really want to build a sustainable business based on customers, and grow from the revenue we make every month,” said Paiva.
TalkDesk was recently chosen as one of the 10 finalists of the CloudBeat Innovation Showdown and will be presenting at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference at the end of the month.
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