Kustomer Buying Reply.ai: Details About The Deal

By Dan Anderson ● May 15, 2020
  • Omnichannel SaaS platform company Kustomer announced it signed an agreement to buy Reply.ai. These are the details about the deal.

Omnichannel SaaS platform company Kustomer announced it signed an agreement to buy Reply.ai, which is a customer service automation company founded in 2016 that helps companies scale intelligent customer service without compromising experience. And Reply utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning models to improve agent efficiency through self-service chatbot and deflection capabilities.

This deal comes on the heels of the expanded rollout of Kustomer IQ. Kustomer IQ is an artificial intelligence engine embedded across Kustomer’s CRM platform. And with Reply, Kustomer can provide even deeper intelligent self-service and assistance via Natural Language Processing (NLP) based chatbots, enhanced omnichannel customer deflection, and machine learning-based response suggestions. Reply will also accelerate Kustomer’s European growth by significantly increasing its presence in the region.

The Reply suite of tools include deflection capabilities — which looks at historical and contextual data — continuously improving over time as well as deflection widgets that can be embedded in forms and email and features a powerful information retrieval system that extracts relevant answers to customer questions from a company knowledge base. And Reply also features a platform to build chatbots that can be deployed across multiple channels and languages, and agent-assist tools that suggest relevant answers to messages and subsequent actions, such as routing or auto-tagging conversations.

Key Quotes:

“We believe artificial intelligence is essential to helping today’s enterprises scale customer service and efficiently deliver exceptional results.  We recently rolled out Kustomer IQ to meet the growing need for companies to have access to the power of AI, and with today’s acquisition, we continue our investment in bringing self-service tools and intelligence capabilities to our clients. Reply has built deflection and self-service chatbots that help companies effectively deflect initial customer communications at an astounding rate of 40 percent. This means that almost half of all initial customer communications can be successfully resolved without requiring live interaction with a service agent, bringing greater efficiency to the entire customer service function.  We are excited to welcome co-founders Omar and Pablo Pera and the entire Reply team of world class data scientists and engineers to the Kustomer Krew.”

“By leveraging advanced AI capabilities and Kustomer’s robust CRM platform, combined with self-service deflection tools, Kustomer is uniquely built for the needs of today’s enterprise companies. Since 2015, we have been committed to revolutionizing customer service and today’s acquisition of Reply marks one more step in our journey.”

– Brad Birnbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Kustomer

“We are excited for Reply to join Kustomer and share its mission to make customer service more efficient, effective and personalized. As a long-time partner of Kustomer, we are able to seamlessly integrate our deflection and chatbots technologies into Kustomer’s platform and help brands more cost-effectively increase efficiency. We look forward to working with Brad and the entire team.”

– Omar Pera, Co-Founder of Reply.