Sales & customer service tech (2024)

1. AI-driven customer support

   Swedish fintech Klarna says its AI customer support assistant — which is hooked up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is doing the work of 700 human agents and has handled two-thirds of the company’s customer service queries in its first month. This change to Klarna’s customer service could boost profits by $40m in 2024, the company says.

   European startups including Berlin’s Parloa and Lyon’s Fluid Topics are training GenAI to tackle customer complaints efficiently.

   While Parloa has a broader focus and is trying to automate the entire customer service process, Fluid Topics aims to offer customer service agents better tools to reduce resolution times and number of support tickets generated.

2. Sales tools for the plebs

   In Europe, where 99% of companies are SMEs, you don’t always get the deep pockets that can afford subscriptions to market leading sales platforms like Salesforce or Adobe Commerce.

   Seeing this market gap are startups specifically targeting the companies with $5m-$20m in sales volume per year.

   French startup Catalog, for example, has tools to help companies manage their inbound sales orders. It has created an AI assistant that can scan inbound emails and transform free-form conversations into orders in the platform.

3. Will AI enhance or erase jobs?

   Customer service has been recognised as one of the 10 most stressful jobs — the industry experiences an average turnover of 45% every year.

   Tech is getting better at filtering queries and customers don’t mind engaging with bots for basic queries if they can receive an immediate resolution, rather than waiting for an agent.

   With tech handling the basic stuff, employees can focus on more complex tasks, which can also help them advance their careers. According to a recent study, 35% of inexperienced staff reported that AI has helped improve their efficiency.

4. B2B sales relying less on ‘gut’

   The great benefit of automating data entry is that it counteracts the risk of salespeople misinterpreting or overinflating the likelihood of a lead converting, Cait Kennedy, sales expert and cofounder of Spoons, told Sifted earlier this year. “A lot of reps will put in information based on gut instinct which doesn’t necessarily hold any water.”

   With enterprise accounts, she adds, “there are more touch points required to make a sale, so any tools to speed up those manual steps will have a big impact”.

   Historically, B2B and enterprise sales have been much more subjective than B2C sales, which were always more analytically driven. One of the problems with B2B was that there wasn’t enough data to make meaningful analysis because it was relying on salespeople to load this data into the CRM. Today that’s changing.

Who early stage startups are up against