dir="ltr">Some of the most promising applications of artificial intelligence in customer service are often considered to be customer-facing, such as chatbots, but artificial intelligence has important applications for customer service teams internally as well. Unifying back-end business tools, including Salesforce, Google Drive, Slack, and others, and then extracting data from these channels to make it available as soon as an agent needs access to it is a herculean task—one that Squelch has set out to tackle with the $12 million the company secured in its latest round of funding.
A software-as-a-service offering, Squelch promises to unify customer service platforms and other software that customer service agents use, making it more user-friendly through artificial intelligence. Squelch works by integrating these disparate tools and parsing their data for critical information that agents have created, such as bug logs, tickets, and case archives. It then analyzes it all through natural language processing technology and the help of the Elasticsearch analytics engine, an open source analytics tool. The data that Squelch collects and processes is then run through machine learning algorithms so that the AI can learn the patterns of individual agents using these tools and deliver value in the future.
Once the AI learns the relationships between the systems and the data created within them, it can start to gain an understanding of certain tasks and begin to automate them, improving performance. For example, it will automatically omit from search results documents that are the same but exist in two separate systems.
Jayaram Bhat, CEO and cofounder of Squelch, outlined the company's vision in an interview with TechCrunch:
“Squelch has empowered thousands of customer support and success agents—maximizing productivity, personalizing every interaction, and enhancing both customer and agent satisfaction. We aim to reach more of these professionals so that they, too, can deliver an unmatched customer experience. For many organizations today, customer experience is the foundation of their business strategy, and Squelch is critical to delivering on that strategy.”
The company’s latest round of funding brings its total to $20 million. It is backed by Correlation Ventures and Tenaya Capital.