Kustomer calls itself a next-generation customer management platform for the people-first enterprise, in other words, the CRM for the future.

“We are like Salesforce but 20 years newer and 20 years more modern,” exclaimed Brad Birnbaum, CEO and founder in a telephone interview. “Once a decade, every product needs to be reinvented.”

The company’s big differentiator is real-time, actionable views of customers, enabling continuous omnichannel conversations. This coupled with intelligence that automates repetitive, manual tasks.

The company’s goal is to make personalized, efficient and effortless customer service a reality.

About 15 years ago adding text chat to the call center became a thing. Interestingly – so many of the contact center solutions of today were invented before this time. Chat became a bolt-on to an existing platform. Likewise with other pieces of omnichannel.

This is what is meant by reinventing customer service/CRM.

A few years earlier Marc Benioff invented CRM software as a service via Salesforce. At the time, his company rode the wave of what was called application service providers or ASPs which eventually became known as cloud.

Kustomer wants to be the new Salesforce integrating the latest communications touchpoints, automation and digital transformation concepts.

Brad explained the Kustomer platform has lots of integration points with the ability to tie in order commerce and ecommerce with modern support for omnichannel.

“The idea is to treat customers like people, not tickets,” he exclaimed. “We allow agents to see the full context of a customer when supporting them.

Content like Oracle, Salesforce and Zendesk conversations integrate into the platform.

The company’s intelligent automation is another differentiator – Brad explained it can be used to find unhappy customers. This is done via construction of branchable multi-step workflows and business logic to automate platform actions and agent tasks. He said, “You can find customers who used to place on average three orders a month and haven’t ordered in 90 days.

“You can then nurture them in the way they want to be contacted.” he said.

We spoke some weeks back and at the time they were working on SOC2 and HIPAA compliance as well as native Gmail support.

Kustomer is on a roll… Growing by 500%, having raised $73.5 million and having Ring, Birkenstock and Untuckit as customers.