Tallinn-based Klaus raises €12M to scale AI-powered customer service

Founded in 2018, Klaus has found traction with hundreds of global enterprise customers, among them household names such as Glovo, SoundCloud, and Epic Games. The new round of funding will deepen Klaus’ core focus on product and engineering teams while bringing new growth through sales and marketing.

Recent research commissioned by Microsoft shows that 95% of consumers say that customer service is important for brand loyalty, and more than 60% report having deserted a brand and switching to a rival company because of poor service. With customer reviews increasingly important for sales, the business impact of poor service can be devastating. In large enterprises with omnichannel contact centres, it is not unusual to have 2,000 or more agents handling over a million conversations per month. Such volumes make it nearly impossible to gain a real overview, and the bulk of customer conversations are a black hole. With manual review processes, it is a major time-suck to scrutinise even a fraction of 1% of total interactions.

Klaus’ AI-powered review automation platform enables the analysis and 100% coverage of customer interactions. It generates insights that are meaningful and can be relied on to bring radical service improvements to large and growing organisations struggling to maintain consistent service quality. Klaus is currently analysing over two million conversations daily from its mostly enterprise-size customers. It breaks this data down into searchable, trackable information with relevant highlights brought to immediate attention before they can become problems. Klaus’ UI is highly customizable, industry-agnostic, and runs on a cloud-based SaaS model. ‘Feedback scorecards’ that rate and track conversation quality has been at the heart of Klaus’ offering from the beginning.

Recent upgrades include customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) capabilities that are drastically boosting engagement and actionable intel through the use of its algorithms. With AI-boosted CSAT improving insight into external feedback, as well as the internal feedback provided by their core product, Klaus can now give a truly complete overview of the quality of customer support.

“The Series A funding means we can now scale our growth to the next level. To do that, we are seeking the best sales and marketing talent as well as adding to our team of PhD’d, data-science aces. As we hope to almost double our team in the next six months, we are excited that we have the resources to really find the best people.” -- Martin Kõiva, co-founder and CEO of Klaus

“We started with a simple idea that great conversations can turn customer service into a core revenue driver. We’ve now seen first hand how hundreds of Klaus’ customers have dramatically improved customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and lowered first contact resolution times resulting in higher referral rates and more repeat business.” -- Kair Käsper, co-founder and CRO of Klaus

The software integrates with all the most popular contact center platforms, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom. It pulls in every text and audio customer interaction, considers dozens of factors that are likely to be problematic, and finds all the outlier conversations that need to be looked at in more detail. These dialogues might be longer than most, include negative tone of voice, or show a customer waiting for a long time. Because Klaus reviews the entire data set, rather than random anomalies that might not be indicative of a trend, the structured feedback enables managers to give useful support to  their agents, even for the largest customer contact operations.

Julius Lühr of Acton Capital, the lead investor in this current series A round, commented: “Especially in times of rising customer acquisition costs across the board, a loyal customer base sets the best companies apart in every industry. Klaus has developed the perfect tool to help companies stop flying blind and implement strategic customer support as a core differentiator. Emerging from Estonia, Klaus’ beautiful yet uniquely powerful product shares the DNA of the region’s great success stories.”