Helpshift Announces European Expansion Following Year of Record Growth and Innovation

By STS News Desk On May 14, 2019

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Digital Customer Service Company Has Established European Presence to Better Support Growing Base of European Customers

Helpshift, the company revolutionizing the customer service industry through its intelligent and asynchronous digital messaging platform, announced that it has expanded its footprint to Europe.

“It’s a company with a great product, great people and a great culture. I’m thrilled to be joining the Helpshift team at this critical moment of expansion.”

Helpshift has hired teams in the U.K. and the Netherlands to supplement existing research and development headquarters in Pune, India, and field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Salt Lake City. This expansion follows a record-breaking fiscal year for Helpshift, which added new customers and partnerships, received industry recognition and launched transformational new products, including asynchronous messaging across web and mobile — a first in the digital customer service industry.

“The Helpshift platform is built to support a global customer base, and now the Helpshift team is, too,” said Helpshift CEO Linda Crawford. “We want to be where our customers are, and this expansion is the natural next step for us. We look forward to working more closely with our existing EMEA customers and bringing modern digital customer service to the broader European market.”

Bringing the Asynchronous Messaging Revolution to European B2C Brands

The list of brands relying on Helpshift’s platform to deliver fast, efficient, messaging-based support to their customers 24/7 continues to grow. Almost a third of Helpshift’s business is already based in Europe — including customers like Supercell, Next Games and Virgin Media.

Helpshift’s customer service platform was built to serve an international customer base. The Helpshift SDK supports more than 180 languages — meaning it can automatically detect what language customers are using on their devices and offer support in that language — and the AI engine “speaks” 20 languages, so it can detect the language of the customer and route the request to an appropriate agent. Helpshift is also GDPR compliant.

Additionally, with Helpshift’s asynchronous messaging for web and mobile, customers can start their support session in a messaging window but leave without having to worry that their history will be deleted. Instead, they’ll be notified when an agent responds and resume the conversation at their convenience. This helps support “follow-the-sun” staffing models for international customer bases.

Now Hiring — With an Eye on Localization

Helpshift has already made several important hires since setting up shop in Europe:

Evert-Jan Tazelaar, vice president of EMEA, who has over 25 years experience selling software solutions in both individual sales and sales leadership roles. Prior to joining Helpshift, Tazelaar worked as the VP EMEA for communications, media and energy at Vlocity. Previously Tazelaar worked in a variety of senior sales roles at companies such as SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft.
Gerry O’Neill, U.K. sales director, who has more than 25 years of experience, has come to Helpshift from Salesforce. Previously, he held various technical and leadership roles at blue chip companies, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and startups like Motive Communications (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent) and Tivoli Systems.
Jon Laughland, U.K. sales director brings decades of experience and a strong enterprise sales track record to his new role at Helpshift. He joins Helpshift from cloud technology company Skuid. Before that, he held various sales roles at SAP and SAP partners such as AgilityWorks Ltd., CompromiseIT and a sales leadership role at Redwood Software.

Helpshift plans to make an additional 40 global hires this year — including enterprise and corporate account executives, sales engineers and customer success managers — and has brought on a diversity and inclusion-focused recruiter to further the company’s goal of creating a diverse and gender-equal workplace.

“Helpshift is setting the bar for digital customer service worldwide,” said Tazelaar. “It’s a company with a great product, great people and a great culture. I’m thrilled to be joining the Helpshift team at this critical moment of expansion.”