Everyone has a smart phone. That’s smart. But the app you are trying to access bungles transactions. That’s dumb.
HelpShift knows something about that. In the past year, the company has specialized in providing mobile gaming vendors with the needed software development kit to analyze problems and craft solutions for users. Now the company is providing its SDK to Salesforce to resolve mobile problems for more mainstream companies.
“We created the next big thing for mobile,” said Abinash Tripathy, CEO and co-founder of Helpshift. Now Helpfshift will “bridge the traditional and mobile markets.”
The problem Helpshift focuses on is the failed transaction. “These (mobile) apps are highly monetized. Commerce goes on these apps,” Tripathy said. This could be game currency or an actual purchase that fails to go through. At this point the user needs help.
Helpshift sampled its installed base of 1.3 billion handheld devices to find out more. It turns out that one out of five users actively sought help. By setting up an in-app FAQ to cover most problems (as measured by user data), Helpshift managed to cut actual support tickets down to about seven percent of that total.
The ultimate goal in automating customer support is to shift from reactive to proactive, Tripathy continued. Now the customer is e-mailing or calling a help desk and has to describe the problem to get help from a person at the other end. “The agent asks questions to get at the root of the problem. This results in ‘back and forth.’” he said.
Rolling customer support into a CRM function allows the help desk to know the user’s history using the app, and with the data pinpoint the problem. Having that information can allow a help desk to close out 70 to 80 percent of tickets on the first contact, Tripathy explained. Taken to the next level, user data can be used to flag problems before they happen.
Helpshift takes in about four billion data points per day, compilation of which “makes customer support intelligent.” Tripathy said. Right now that database comes mostly from the mobile gaming world. Helpshift already placed its product on about 80 percent of all online gaming apps in 2015, Tripathy pointed out. By porting its SDK to the Salesforce platform, Helpshift will be aiding customer service on one of the most commonly used CRM platforms in
corporate America, he noted.
“Salesforce is used as the system of record. We are automating a way to add data from mobile.” Tripathy said. “We want to play well with Salesforce.”
