Directly, a leader in customer experience automation, today announced an additional $11 million in new funding, expanding the $20 million strategic investment announced in January, and bringing the total funding round to $31 million. New investors Triangle Peak Partners and Toba Capital join previously announced investors Samsung NEXT, Industry Ventures, Microsoft’sM12 Ventures, True Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Northgate in the round.
Directly makes customer support operations more resilient. Companies automate and resolve support issues within the IVR, email, web, live chat, and messaging channels using the Directly platform. The platform provides insights into customer conversations, automates common support issues, and engages community experts to resolve customer issues more reliably at scale. Directly customers are able to reduce customer contacts up to 80%, boost customer satisfaction by up to 20% and save millions per year.
“At its core, our business is about helping customer support leaders resolve customer issues with the right mix of automation and human support,” said Directly CEO Mike de la Cruz. “It’s one thing to deliver a great product today, but we’re committed to ensuring that our customers have the solutions they need over the long term. That means constantly investing in our platform and expanding our capabilities so that we can keep up with the rapid pace of technological change and an unpredictable economic landscape. These new partnerships and this latest expansion of our recent funding round have positioned us to do just that. We’re excited to be collaborating with our new partners and very thankful to all of our investors for their support.”
Mike was with SAP some years ago and I had a chance to interview him in 2008. At the time we discussed CRM relevance across all customer touchpoints. It is good to see Mike has been consistent in his career choices. 🙂
Directly is more than just a customer support company, their AI integration qualifies them as a Future of Work (FoW) organization as well. One definition of FoW is allowing AI and humans to work together to become more efficient.
“Directly has established itself as a true leader in helping customers thrive during these turbulent economic times,” said Tyler Peterson, Partner at Triangle Peak Partners. “There is little doubt that automation will play a tremendous role in the future of customer support, but Directly is realizing that potential today. Their platform enables businesses to strike just the right balance between automation and human support, helping them adopt AI-powered solutions in a way that is practical, accessible, and demonstrably effective.”
Alongside the new funding, Directly is introducing a partner ecosystem and robust APIs to help customer support leaders seamlessly access the benefits of its platform. The first secured partnerships are with leading virtual agent companies Meya, Percept.ai, and SmartAction. As part of this program, Directly is granting companies exclusive access to the power of its expert network. This network and operating model are what enables Directly to offer resilient customer support to leading global enterprises like Microsoft, Samsung, and Airbnb.
“The team at Directly have quickly proven to be trusted and invaluable partners,” said Erik Kalviainen, CEO at Meya. “As a result of our collaboration, Meya is now able to take advantage of a whole new set of capabilities that will enable us to deliver automated solutions both faster and with higher resolution rates, without customers needing to deploy significant internal resources. That’s a powerful advantage at a time when scale and efficiency are key to any successful customer support operation.”
If you found this article interesting, we invite you to join us at the world’s only Future of Work Expo collocated with the ITEXPO #TECHSUPERSHOW, June 22-25, 2021 in Miami, Florida. See the video below.
Join others with $25B+ in IT buying power who plan 2021 budgets! Including 3,500+ resellers!
A unique experience with a collocated SD-WAN Expo, AIOps Expo and MSP Expo… Register now and you could win a Tesla on Feb 12th.
