Solution Embeds Knowledge Directly into Slack, Salesforce, and All Web-based Applications; Improves the Customer Experience by Coaching Employees Everywhere They Work
Guru, the industry’s only solution to contextually coach support and sales teams with bots and browser extensions, has announced that it has secured $9.3 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital. Previous investors FirstMark Capital and MSD Capital, Michael Dell’s personal investment fund, also participated in the funding round. Guru plans to use the funding to enhance its machine learning-based coaching capabilities for its customers and drive growth.
Rick Nucci, Co-founder and CEO, Guru, said, “With tens of thousands of people relying on Guru everyday, we are now excited to deliver on the next part of our mission: to intelligently suggest critical company knowledge to the employee when they are most likely to need it, right into their workflow. Imagine being a new support agent and instantly getting access to the prior learning of your entire support organization, in context. Or being a salesperson and getting real-time coaching on product knowledge honed from interacting with similar customers in the past. We believe that the idea of having to search around for answers to important questions will become a legacy concept in the future.”
Guru delivers the information needed by sales and support staff, using bots and browser extensions to embed it directly into the industry’s most popular applications, including Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Gmail.
Over the past two years, Guru has added more than 300 actively engaged customers, including Shopify, Square, Intercom, Dell, Optimizely, InVision and Procore. The solution helps employees acquire the knowledge they need to respond to customer queries. Using analytics to continually fine-tune information, Guru ensures that it keeps pace with ever-changing products and processes. As a result, it has created the industry’s only solution with the proprietary engagement data and delivery mechanisms required to provide the accurate, up-to-date, trusted knowledge that employees need to respond to customers’ inquiries — at the moment they need it.
Dana Tessier, Director of Knowledge Management, Shopify, said, “What sold me on Guru was how it’s embedded into a support agent’s workflow. Unlike our previous solution, our agents don’t have to switch tabs or go anywhere to find the information they need. The results have been a 5x lift in the amount our knowledge was utilized while responding to customers. Our handle time has improved, and I’m more confident that the knowledge conveyed to customers is accurate and up-to-date.”
As the way teams work continues to evolve, Guru is uniquely situated to be the single source for company knowledge and to leverage machine learning to help coach workers in real-time and in the context of the task being performed. With an average worker spending more than 30 percent of their workweek just searching for information, Guru’s web app, browser extension, and Slack bot eliminates the need to search through email threads, Google docs, Slack, and multiple knowledge bases, increasing productivity and ensuring consistency. As a result, customers like Intercom have seen a 60 per cent reduction in the amount of time it takes for their support teams to respond to customers.
Gordon Ritter, Co-Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, said, “After 40-years of forms-based software, we believe the next generation of enterprise cloud winners will be built around behavioral data networks and machine learning to coach workers toward doing their jobs more effectively. We call this phenomenon the Coaching Cloud, and we’re thrilled to add Guru to our portfolio of early leaders in the space.”
Jake Saper, Principal at Emergence Capital, said, “Guru’s clever in-context user interface (UI) has driven a level of engagement and passion amongst its users that blew us away when we spoke with them. Guru is delivering information when and where users need it, and they love it as a result.”
