Agent IQ Raises $6.3M to Kill Bot-Only and Traditional Customer Support with First-Ever AI Omnichannel Solution that Turns Customer Care Agents into “Super Agents”

Agent IQ, the company bringing scalable 1:1 conversations to the enterprise, today announced it has raised a $6.3 million Series A round of funding led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from CRCM Ventures and Rubicon Ventures. The funding will be used to expand Agent IQ’s team and scale its leading AI-powered customer support platform used by companies like Nike, Airbnb, Gillette and more. Tim Guleri from Sierra Ventures will also be joining Agent IQ’s Board.

Agent IQ champions a new approach to customer care that brings the human touch back to the forefront. Enterprise companies, who previously preferred programmed chatbots and zero human intervention, are learning that bots are bad for businesses and consumers. Aside from ditching the “bots-only” approach in favor of more human-like interaction, Agent IQ boasts an AI-powered, conversational platform that isn’t merely layered on top of existing infrastructure like competing customer support products.

Agent IQ’s hybrid human/machine platform allows companies to deliver intimate, one-on-one experiences to their customers at scale. Human agents no longer have to handle mundane, low-level requests (e.g., booking plane tickets, returning products) that comprise more than 60 percent of total interactions. Instead, these empowered “super agents” can leave simple inquiries to Agent IQ’s AI, take on more complex requests, and resolve 15x more customer interactions daily.

The company is also the first and only omnichannel solution that combines AI with powerful customer engagement technology to allow agents to interact across channels like webchat, social, email, and voice, resulting in smoother communication and happier customers and employees. This omnichannel approach facilitates cross-team communication and knowledge sharing in the face of rapidly changing number of social networks and tools.

“Bots-only is dead,” said Agent IQ founder and CEO, Craig Davis. “Big-name brands are quickly finding out that customers don’t want to only speak with robots. This is why Agent IQ’s ability to scale intimate one-on-one conversations through AI and save human agents’ expertise for more complicated situations is invaluable to enterprises and their employees. We’re excited to use our new round of funding to build our team and help more enterprise companies restore the human touch.”

“AI continues to fundamentally upend the existing application software industry and CRM is no exception,” added Tim Guleri, Managing Partner at Sierra Ventures. “Agent IQ’s innovative built from the ground up,

AI-powered CRM product will transform the customer support landscape for all consumer-facing businesses. Agent IQ’s impressive list of clients speaks to how valuable the platform is to these businesses, their consumers and their agents. We’re proud to support Agent IQ’s mission to bring intimacy back to an industry built upon personable, genuine interaction with customers while changing the economics for providing the service.”

Enterprise companies can see up to 85 percent of their customers’ inquiries handled by Agent IQ’s AI, helping to increase the bandwidth of support agents and lower customer service costs by 21 percent on average. Agent IQ’s facilitation of team communications across channels -- Twitter, SMS, voice, email and more -- fully prepares companies for customers interacting through any type of messaging platform.

“Partnering with Agent IQ and its ”hybrid platform" bolsters conversations across all of our consumer engagement channels, said Bernard Thomas, Director of Operations and Technology at Bed Bath & Beyond. “Agent IQ’s powerful AI not only improves overall quality, compliance and operational efficiency, but it facilitates new offerings like concierge services and distinct product support with cost effective AI. As consumers migrate into digital commerce, it will be critical for companies to strategically align with an innovative partner that is passionately focused on being best-in-class with learning and automation technologies and that partner is Agent IQ.”

Davis, a marketing technology veteran who previously worked in finance and adtech, assembled a world-class engineering unit to help develop Agent IQ’s technology, including its CTO, Slaven Bilac, who headed the Artificial and Machine Intelligence unit at Google Cloud. As 2018 progresses, Agent IQ’s team will continue to make enterprise customer interactions as seamless as possible and pave the way for non-robotic, scaled, customer-centric experiences.

For more information about Agent IQ, please visit agentiq.com.

About Agent IQ

Agent IQ solves the growing problem of providing high-quality 1:1 customer service to customers at scale and in real-time. By hybridizing machine learning and artificial intelligence with live customer service agents, Agent IQ enables brands to scale consumer conversations.

Machine learning captures every exchange, training the artificial intelligence to provide the best customer experience possible. In addition to enhancing the customer experience at scale, the AI acts as a virtual assistant to brand representatives, displaying suggested responses and equipping the agent with relevant knowledge in real time.

Thanks to Agent IQ’s first-of-its-kind omnichannel technology, internal teams who cover different customer support channels -- webhcat, Twitter, email, voice, etc. -- can now communicate effectively, resulting in happier customers and employees.

Contact Information

Kayla Abbassi

Account Manager

VSC for Agent IQ

kayla@vscconsulting.com