Gladly Introduces Its AI and Automation Customer Service Platform, Gladly Sidekick
Connected to the company’s acquisition of Thankful, Gladly Sidekick helps brands save money, deliver personalized customer service at scale, and build lifelong customer loyalty
Gladly, the only customer service software company built around people, not tickets, announced Gladly Sidekick. The new AI and automation platform enables brands to scale their customer service through personalized self-service. Gladly Sidekick is designed to work hand-in-hand with Gladly Hero, the company’s platform for personalized agent-assisted customer service.
Gladly Sidekick is a result of Gladly’s acquisition of Thankful, a generative AI and no-code automation solution. The two companies have been partners since 2020, powering personalized service at scale for shared customers from some of the world’s most-loved brands including Bombas, Breeze Airways, Crate & Barrel, JOANN and MaryRuth Organics. Gladly Sidekick provides a human-like experience to resolve common customer inquiries like returns and ‘where is my order?’, which frees up customer service teams to handle conversations that require a human touch. Altogether, this contributes to the best possible customer experience — from reducing wait times to creating truly personalized service — as well as measurable ROI and higher customer lifetime value for brands.
“AI is transforming how companies provide customer service, but with customer loyalty at stake, it must be done right,” said Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly. “Gladly is known for software that turns customer service agents into heroes, and Thankful has built a great business helping brands deliver automated and personalized customer service 24/7. By layering Thankful’s AI and automation on top of our people-centered platform, we’re making the customer service ecosystem more personalized for consumers in a more scalable way for brands.”
“By layering Thankful’s AI and automation on top of our people-centered platform, we’re making the customer service ecosystem more personalized for consumers in a more scalable way for brands.”
Gladly will now offer customers two products — Gladly Hero and Gladly Sidekick. Together they will leverage AI to power the customer and the agent side of a brand’s customer service.
- Gladly Hero is the company’s platform for human customer service agents, built around people, not tickets. It turns agents into customer service heroes and helps them build deep connections and loyalty by recognizing customers individually and organizing customer conversations into a single, lifelong conversation independent of channel. The product uses seat-based pricing and offers Hero AI capabilities, including summarizing conversations, suggesting replies, and rewriting copy.
- Gladly Sidekick is the company’s new consumer AI and automation platform for customer service teams, built to help consumers help themselves. It is built around a no-code authoring solution that enables customer service teams to create automated conversation threads. These threads help brands guide consumers through some of the most common customer service requests such as managing an order, processing a return, or requesting an exchange. Gladly Sidekick includes conversational responses from Gladly Answers, a searchable knowledge base of frequently asked questions. The product uses consumption-based pricing based on the number of assisted conversations.
According to recent data from McKinsey, 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies, but they want to be treated like a person, not a case number as uncovered in Gladly’s Customer Expectations Report. AI and automation can create this more personalized experience at a fraction of the cost; and when used together with AI-powered human customer service agents, brands can streamline interactions with customers to make them feel like VIPs, building lifelong loyalty while sustaining the valuable human element.
“Gladly has the team, product, and strategy to deliver Thankful’s vision of better living through service and better service through technology,” said Ted Mico, CEO and Co-Founder of Thankful. “And we’ve already proven the value of offering personalized service at scale with our shared customers.”
“I’m excited to join the Gladly team as Software Engineer Fellow,” said Evan Tann, CTO and co-founder at Thankful. “Now we can continue to evolve the product to satisfy the needs of end-customers while making it business-safe for brands.”
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