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There\u2019s no shortage of customer service startups trying to meet the changing expectations of consumers, who want to Tweet, phone, text and use Facebook Messenger, among other newer ways to get their points across. In fact, according to the investment platform AngelList, there are now 960 companies<\/a> currently operating\u00a0around customer care.<\/p>\n That hasn\u2019t deterred Joseph Ansanelli, who joined Greylock Partners as a general partner in 2012 but who\u2019d first started and sold three companies and was itching to do it again.<\/p>\n As he recalls it, he was having dinner with colleague\u00a0Aneel Bhusri, a former Greylock partner (and now advisor) and the co-founding CEO of the HR and financial management company Workday<\/a>. It was 2012, Workday had just gone public and the two were talking about the onerous but exciting process of starting companies. Before he knew it, Ansanelli was calling enterprise customers \u2014 contacts from his earlier life as a founder \u2014 and asking them what they were lacking.<\/p>\n The two things he learned from those conversations were, \u201cfirst, that they were getting tons of demands and requests from consumers about more ways to communicate, and second, a lot of the [related] software available to them was on-premise stuff centered around case numbers and tickets.\u201d<\/p>\n And customers, says Ansanelli, \u201cdon\u2019t like being a case or ticket number.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, his\u00a0newest cloud-based company, Gladly<\/a>, quickly formed\u00a0around the idea of an enterprise-class company that did away with them, and he moved to\u00a0get his old band together. Toward that end, he reached out to\u00a0Michael Wolfe, who was Ansanelli\u2019s co-founder at\u00a0Vontu, a\u00a0data loss prevention software company that was acquired by Symantec for $350 million<\/a> in 2007,\u00a0as well as Connectify, a company they sold<\/a> in 1999 to Kana Communications. (Old timers may remember that Kana\u00a0was a dot-com darling that helped pioneer the concept of email for customer service. It\u00a0went public<\/a> in 1999\u00a0and\u00a0was taken private again in 2010.)<\/p>\n Ansanelli separately\u00a0called up Dirk Kessler, who was Connectify\u2019s first engineer but who\u2019d met Ansanelli at the outset of their careers when both worked at Apple. Even Jenny Roy, a communications professional who\u2019d worked at Vontu, was tapped again; today\u2019s she\u2019s Gladly\u2019s VP of marketing.<\/p>\n What the trusted colleagues have built, says Ansanelli, is more than another new ticketing system aimed at small and medium size businesses, of which there are many. (Think Freshdesk<\/a> and Zendesk<\/a>, among them.) Instead, he says, Gladly, based in San Francisco, keeps track of every customer interaction so that each exchange with a\u00a0person\u00a0isn\u2019t viewed as distinct but rather an ongoing conversation, one that can be hosted on any medium, whether it\u2019s Messenger or Kik or WhatsApp or SMS.\u00a0People are the \u201catomic unit,\u201d he says, not cases or tickets.<\/p>\n Gladly also is catering to the big enterprise customers that have long relied on Salesforce and Oracle and Cisco. It\u2019s a very tall order, but one helped along by the background of Ansanelli and company. \u201cFor a large part of these large enterprise customers to feel confident to work with a startup is a challenge, but they look at our track record and they know we\u2019ve been through this before,\u201d he says. Ansanelli notes, for example, that\u00a0one of Vontu\u2019s earlier customers was the\u00a0Bank of America. \u201cWhen you can say, \u2018We\u2019ve scaled BofA and Goldman and JPMorgan Chase and we know how to do this,\u2019 it helps us out immensely.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether it helps out enough remains to be seen, but Gladly has already secured five large customers that Ansanelli says he can\u2019t name publicly today. Asked if these are the financial services firms that Ansanelli knows so well, he says financial services is a \u201cfocus\u201d as are \u201cretail, travel and leisure\u201d and other companies whose contact centers are closely tied to generating revenue.<\/p>\n In the meantime, investors clearly see room\u00a0for Gladly, despite both its entrenched and many younger (and also well-funded)\u00a0competitors. The 50-person company\u00a0just\u00a0closed on $36 million in Series C funding led by the cross-border firm GGV Capital, with participation from earlier backers Greylock Partners and New Enterprise Associates.<\/p>\n It has now raised $63 million altogether.<\/p>\n Pictured, from left to right: Gladly founders Michael Wolfe, Dirk Kessler and Joseph Ansanelli. Courtesy of Gladly.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/04\/gladly-founders1.jpg?w=680\")
There’s no shortage of customer service startups trying to meet the changing expectations of consumers, who want to Tweet, phone, text and use Facebook Messenger, among other newer ways to get their points across. That hasn’t deterred Joseph Ansanelli, who joined Greylock Partners in 2012 but who’d first started and sold three companies and was itching to do it again. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
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