Record Growth at Ultimate, Celebrates Continued Customer Expansion and Product Innovation in 2022
Ultimate, the top-rated support automation solution according to G2 customer reviews, is celebrating a successful start to 2022, with a record-breaking first half of year, newly-appointed executive to lead global customer success, and continued product innovation to help leading brands efficiently and holistically automate their customer support.
In Q1, Ultimate celebrated 166% growth in new brands year-on-year, adding deals including Zoopla, Get Your Guide, iCard, and Conekta. The company is also steadily increasing its US market presence – having just launched a strategic partnership with Vonage, the market leader in communication APIs and cloud-based contact center software, and signed key clients such as Remote, the San Francisco-based remote work solutions platform.
With great customers comes great responsibility. And to spearhead customer-facing initiatives, Kimberley Wood has joined as Vice President of Customer Success. With a strong track record of growing and transforming success functions – from GoCardless (online payment processing) to Qubit (ecommerce personalization) to Bazaarvoice (social commerce) – Kim brings a skillset lazer-focused on driving more value for Ultimate’s customers. Under her leadership, businesses will benefit from elevated virtual agent onboarding and training offerings, enabling their human agents to enjoy an enriched work life and obtain maximum value from Ultimate’s expertise in support automation and CX best practices.
Reflecting on her ambitions for the Customer Success team at Ultimate, Kim said: “With a product market fit so clear and a team this strong, the sky’s the limit for us to increase the satisfaction we deliver to our customers and unlock even more value for them as they expand.”
Customer expansion has certainly been the name of the game in 2022, with 100% of customers scaling their usage with Ultimate. Brands such as TransferGo and PURELEI are two of many currently in the process of expanding from just chat automation to also include ticket automation with Ultimate – a smart move to tackle what remains a stubbornly high volume channel for customer support functions, and one growing 10% year on year. This expansion from chat to email is part of a product roadmap focussed on omnichannel CX and driven by customer appetite. One key result of its focus in 2022? A native Freshdesk integration for ticket automation, to unlock Ultimate’s automation capabilities for tens of thousands of Freshworks customers worldwide, launching on July 5th.
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To the delight of its global customer base, additional product releases at Ultimate have focused on making it as easy as possible to create and maintain virtual agents across many different support channels and languages: with upgraded multilingual bots, as well as an intuitive Dialogue Builder for ticket automation and enhanced analytics.
With changes to the global economy, it has quickly become clear that Ultimate’s application of AI is helping customer support teams keep support levels high-even when they are operating with limited resources and in challenging growth environments. Company CEO and Co-founder Reetu Kainulainen alluded to these market conditions when he said: “While improving customer support by augmenting teams with our tech is Ultimate’s main goal, we realize that efficiency and cost reduction are going to be significant considerations for customers now. The good news is that what we offer will measurably help customers navigate through these uncertain times without additional investments.”
To enable Ultimate’s mission of building the most powerful automation platform in the $1tn support industry, the company continues to grow fast. It now numbers over 130 full-time employees, over 30 of whom joined in H1, and is investing heavily in both go-to-market and R&D across the globe. Having last raised $20M Series A in December 2020, and with ambitions to truly transform the global customer support space, there’s no doubt this momentum marks just one early step of the Ultimate journey.
