Today, Storm Ventures announced our investment in Zingtree. Here are some thoughts about why we expect Zingtree to play a big role in the contact center of the future — a market we know quite well thanks to our investment in another big player in the space Talkdesk.

Please hold, we value your business

We have all experienced those painstakingly long hold times after calling customer support with an obscure technical query. It’s a real test of willpower. Customers’ biggest complaint is being told that their call is valued when they’ve already been waiting for 10 minutes. Bland elevator music and robotic voiceovers can make the wait unbearable!

It’s just as stressful for an agent as they frantically dig around in Google Docs and scour various Wiki pages to identify the most up-to-date information quickly. Fortunately, organizations are beginning to explore new ways of keeping call center agents and their customers happy, with faster response times propelled to the top of their agenda.

Sophisticated No-Code Decision Trees

This is where Zingtree is set to play a vital role. The company has built a platform that allows companies to translate their knowledge base into ‘decision trees’ that help to improve Average Handling Time (AHT) for sales and support calls. Zingtree equips agents for faster decision-making and effective navigation of complex service interactions. It improves First Call Resolution (FCR) rates and customer satisfaction while reducing agent ramp time and overall support costs.

The company is on a mission to make business information actionable for every employee. That’s why the founders decided to create an intuitive, easy-to-use ‘no-code’ tool: even the most junior sales employee can easily build trees and update them when necessary. Some customers shared they have achieved 45–50% faster ticket processing. Imagine what this could mean for businesses handling hundreds or thousands of telephone calls per day!

At the same time, a 50% faster employee ramp-up that Zingtree delivered to many clients means happier agents.

The Great Resignation

The Great Resignation hit the call center environment particularly hard due to changing work expectations. Managers must adapt quickly and start focusing on the key elements of employee retention or risk getting stuck in a damaging cycle of attrition.

One recent study gave a rare but valuable glimpse into the agent’s perspective of modern contact center culture. Agent stress was identified as the main obstacle to employee retention. We know call center burnout has always been a problem, but the indications are that it’s getting worse: a shocking 96% of respondents reported feeling acute stress weekly or even multiple times per week.

Nearly 75% of call center agents are at risk for hotline burnout. Contact centers suffer from some of the highest turnover rates in the US — between 30% and 45%, which is more than twice the average for all other occupations.

The NPS Challenge

Adding to the stress, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming more critical than ever. Benchmarking NPS is tricky, and the acceptable range varies according to the sector (some markets never achieve over 20). However, an NPS below 0 signifies that your business has operational issues. A score between 0 and 30 is satisfactory, but there is still room for improvement. A score over 70 means your customers adore you!

In short, the higher your NPS is, the more likely it is that your customer referrals will convert into fresh leads. What, then, is the key to improving NPS? We know that providing a product that simply works is no longer enough, as customer expectations are more complex and demanding today.

Businesses are now tasked with the challenge of keeping their clients’ interest over the entire customer journey. In the view of both Storm Ventures and Zingtree, a memorable customer experience is crucial to driving up your NPS score. By reducing AHT and increasing FCR, you can provide much faster response, with simplified agent workflows significantly reducing the number of errors.

Achieving Value From Chatbots

Industry analysts estimate that ~$5 billion has been invested in chatbots by the end of 2021. The business results are questionable. Forbes has suggested that despite reducing call volume, chatbots may be duplicating work and generating more overhead and congestion.

One current limitation of chatbots is that their ability to service tickets is restricted to a very narrow set of use cases (for example, a question on the location of a package as a courier transports it). They struggle with more sophisticated queries.

Despite all the chatbot hype (dating from around 2016), experts reckon it could take 10 or 15 more years for them to handle the more complicated requests.

Until then, Zingtree addresses these limitations by guiding chatbots through structured decisions. Extensions make it easy to launch your decision tree from any customer relationship management (CRM) or helpdesk system.

The Winning Team

With an all-star team headed up by President and CEO Juan Jaysingh, an accomplished ITF tennis player behind sports tech startup Universal Tennis (later UTR Powered by Oracle), Zingtree is already serving 700 customers worldwide. I’ve experienced firsthand how Juan truly understands the meaning of “your network is your net worth.” He has built an amazing circle of influence over the years, from previous jobs to family friends and now pickleball =). Any encounter for Juan is an opportunity to create lasting friendships and increase the knowledge and influence he brings to Zingtree.

The veterans at Zingtree understand the challenges every contact center operator faces as they seek to increase revenue and boost their Return on Investment (ROI). It’s difficult to achieve either without first providing positive customer experiences.

Zingtree’s people know exactly how to deliver this, as shown by their track record of building great products for millions of users in e-commerce and fintech, including CPO Brandon Anderson’s time working for SportsEngine, and MarketWatch/Dow Jones.

When we met David Apple, the company’s experienced CRO (Apple-inspired revenue hyper-growth at Notion and Typeform, with 10x and 60x respectively), we quickly became convinced that Zingtree has found a solution to the woes of the modern contact center.

Storm Ventures is honored to join this phenomenal team put together by an exceptional CEO on this exciting journey. Congratulations on your Series A, Zingtree!

P.S. Want to join the business? They are hiring!