Kayako isn’t a new company — the bootstrapped business has been around for 16 years — but it does have an interesting story. Kayako is a unified customer service platform, meaning that companies use their software to manage customer feedback and support across multiple platforms, including phone, email, Twitter and Facebook. With fewer than 100 employees (barely), Kayako has never taken outside funding. It has offices in three countries, is profitable and continues to grow. How, you may ask? TechCrunch visited their London headquarters to chat with founder and CEO Varun Shoor to hear about Kayako’s history and his unconventional path to success. You can read highlights from that conversation in the Q&A below.
TechCrunch: What are the biggest mistakes companies are making in the customer service space?
Kayako: Treating it as a transactional experience is what I would say the biggest mistake is. So companies are still in a situation where they use tickets, as a means of just solving that problem, rather than going beyond tickets and thinking about the entire customer experience. And thinking about what is next after that problem to make sure not only customers are satisfied but that you turn them into advocates and promoters.
TechCrunch: I know often a company just wants to hunker down and build in a vacuum and then that becomes the tendency. Does your platform help them do that?
Kayako: It brings feedback from all platforms into one unified view and helps these companies who are hunkered down building their product really make sense of the entire interaction.
