Why I’m Thrilled to Join Helpshift EMEA at This Critical Moment

Helpshift has just launched EMEA operations to support its growing overseas customer base. Read more here.

I’ve recently started my new dream job at Helpshift — my role being to establish Helpshift as a formidable brand in the world of modern customer service in the UK and Europe. I joined from the world’s largest CRM company after spending more than nine years there.

So far, I’ve noticed some significant and refreshing differences between Helpshift and my previous experience in the space. Being a startup with just over 150 employees worldwide, Helpshift is young, agile, and evolving at breakneck speed. I find this very exciting and incredibly motivational.

I feel that my opinion matters and that I’m empowered to make decisions and choices that can make a difference — and I’m not the only one. I recently visited Helpshift’s San Francisco Headquarters, and found that every one of my colleagues enjoys that same feeling that we’re all helping to build something amazing together.

I’ve also now seen firsthand that Helpshift truly is a customer-focused company. It is staggering and almost impossible to comprehend the scale that the Helpshift platform offers its customers. The ability to personalize every interaction at such scale is something I have never encountered. My colleagues talk in terms of the platform handling tens of millions of issues per day, and how individual companies with hundreds of millions of daily active users rely on this scalability.

Furthermore, Helpshift’s credentials are impeccable. We count some of the biggest consumer brands in the world as customers. These brands love Helpshift: they enjoy operational efficiencies to a degree of which they’ve never seen before.

Customer Service Is Always Innovating, and Helpshift is Leading the Charge

Just when you think you understand customer service, you come across a company like Helpshift that turns it all on its head. Customer service is always innovating. Companies consistently strive to be the first to anticipate and deliver on their customers’ every need. The automated experience will continue to be refined and prioritized, with Gartner predicting that by 2020 customers will manage 85 percent of their enterprise interactions without speaking to a human. Everyone is talking about omnichannel, but Helpshift prioritizes the channels that lend themselves naturally to the automated experience.

I now understand that it’s important that companies are able to achieve levels of automation of 50 percent or more in a matter of weeks — not months or years. What I’ve learned very quickly at Helpshift is that mobile messaging, and in particular asynchronous messaging, is the ideal channel for automation and AI.

Not all consumers need to be able to interact with companies across all channels and certainly not in an immediate fashion, but all will have a preferred means of communication. Today, that’s messaging and it’s important to prioritize channels based on customer preference. These channels happen to be those same channels on which companies can offer an AI-driven, automated experience which, in turn, dramatically reduces the cost to serve. It’s the perfect storm.

Come meet the new Helpshift EMEA team, and see our Chief Strategy Officer, Abinash Tripathy, speak at the AI Summit in London on June 12th and 13th.

If you want to get in contact with Gerry, please email [email protected].