Bow Capital and ServiceNow Ventures invest in Loris to bring no-code AI solutions that assist human agents and conversational insights tools to the mass market.
Loris, the conversational AI software that assists human agents in real time to make customer support more human, empathetic, and scalable, today announced its $12 million Series A funding round. The series was led by Bow Capital, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures and existing investors Floodgate and Vertex Ventures.
Loris plans to invest the funds in expanding their AI capabilities to generate voice-of-customer insights and further enable non-technical leaders that oversee customer service and support teams to efficiently and effectively scale the ‘human touch’ of their department.
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Loris was founded with the idea of increasing empathetic communications in the world.
A human touch
Loris was founded with the idea of increasing empathetic communications in the world, and the product officially launched in April 2021. The first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence software dynamically crafts real-time suggested responses based on the customer’s tone. With Loris, brands have an alternative to chatbots that combines efficiency with sentiment based language techniques that can improve conversation outcomes.
“The scale of demand for real-time customer service and digitally-based customer experiences is unprecedented,” says Etie Hertz, the CEO of Loris. “These interactions are often a brand’s only opportunity to speak directly with their customers and they contain valuable information – what do your customers think about your product, your company and your people? Â We’re incredibly proud that Loris allows brands to discover the true origins of dissatisfaction and the ability to leverage AI technology to solve these issues at scale, ultimately improving efficiency, quality and customer lifetime value.”
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Transforming the customer service industry
Most AI companies in the industry tend to route customers to self-service with automated responses; Loris is focused on guiding human agents every step of the way.
Most natural language processing (“NLP”) software can identify topics, some can detect the generic sentiment in messages. Loris combines NLP with a deep understanding of the customer support domain and dynamically detects customer intent, tracks aspect based sentiment throughout the conversation in real time and predicts the conversation’s positive or negative outcome.
Loris is the only AI company bringing together all of these attributes with a no-code solution that integrates with most existing customer support platforms.
Suraj Patel, Principal at Bow Capital said, “Eighteen months ago, the ability to analyze and aggregate customer sentiment, intent, and suggested resolution language was reserved for large enterprise companies with an in-house fleet of data scientists and machine learning technologists. Loris is the first player to bring these capabilities to the mass market. Our investment reflects our confidence in both Loris’s undeniable success thus far, and the ways in which their artificial intelligence insights will continue to transform the industry.”
Research that expands what’s possible
Loris will be investing the new funding in continued research and development, including enhancing conversational language understanding capabilities, next generation of customer satisfaction analysis, dynamic appeasement and predicting churn threats.
Harvard Business School is studying Loris and one of their ecommerce clients to explore artificial intelligence on customer service agent job performance and satisfaction. Early indicators in the study show that AI is a great equalizer, improving the work experience for new or underperforming agents in particular, and in turn, improving overall agent productivity and job satisfaction, leading to higher satisfaction outcomes for the customers they serve. The full study and results are underway and expected to be published later this summer.
Client success and expanding use cases
Since their seed round, Loris has put its research and expertise to work in new ways for some of the fastest-growing companies in the country.
“We originally came to Loris with a mission to improve our agent’s productivity and to ensure that even newer agents could ramp up faster,” said Enis Haskaj, Director of Operations at Slice, which was an early user of Loris technology. “Appeasements were not an initial focus. However, the impact that Loris demonstrated in just six weeks has been incredible, with a reduction in credits issued by 36% and a projected hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for our business. We now plan to further roll out Loris to additional channels.”
