Why we invested in Aircall: democratizing customer call center software

Ben Fu
NextWorld Insights
Published in
4 min readJun 5, 2018

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We have all been there before–calling into customer support is perhaps one of the most reviled consumer experiences. Agents never seem to know who you are or how to solve your issue. You have to keep validating your identity. You get transferred to different people–rearticulating the same issue ad nauseam. It’s like being in a washing cycle over and over again with people passing you around. The experience isn’t just terrible for the consumer, call center employees hate it too. Quick searches on Google turn up some gems on what it’s like from the inside:

All this mutual loathing begs the question: in this day and age, when we have such rapid access to so much information at our fingertips, why are calls into customer service still so painful? Why is the call center system as a whole still broken?

There are a lot of contributing factors but the primary issue is decentralized customer data. Legacy call center systems are largely stuck in time; they were originally built by big dinosaurs of tech that were once high flyers in the 1990s, but never evolved beyond on-premise, monolithic hardware systems. They were built before the Internet, email, chat, etc. and their primary function was voice connectivity and call routing. This means that they don’t integrate well (if at all) with modern SaaS based systems that hold the wealth of customer data that would help solve the issue–e.g. a customer’s previous buying behavior (both online and offline), email interactions, support ticket history, etc. Traditionally, when a call center employee picks up your call they simply don’t have the access they need to “know” you. They often have to pull your information from numerous applications for that or worse, they’ve never recorded the data about you that matters. You, the customer, are then on the hook to help fill in the details.

This is a perfect scenario for a modern cloud-based solution to come and disrupt this existing $15B+ market. That’s why we are excited about our recent investment in Aircall–a cloud-based call center platform that transforms the customer experience and offers a fully integrated view of the customer.

Full customer data

Aircall’s platform has dozens of 1-click integrations with SaaS applications including leading CRM/helpdesk/collaboration partners, which makes it incredibly valuable out of the box because all of your important customer data is already there to serve them better. Companies can seamlessly integrate with CRM and customer service systems or record — or any other SaaS solutions. Interacting with a call agent then becomes a smarter, more personalized experience because all the customer’s information is right there.

Enterprise to SME

Aircall provides a fully featured call center platform that also comes in at a price point that is accessible to the entire market for enterprises all the way to SMEs. Some big drawbacks of the traditional systems were that they were on-premise, built for large call centers, and highly customized for large companies that have hundreds to thousands of call center agents. With its modern design, cloud-based delivery model, and affordable price point, Aircall has democratized call center software where even the smallest companies in the world can provide data-enriched customer service.

Global agility

Call centers banks are universally associated with the image of a physical location–hundreds of agents with headsets on, sitting in desks that seem to go for miles. This is an expensive investment especially for the upfront cost for setting up traditional call center hardware and software. It’s also a limiting factor for the fast growing companies trying to expand globally. Perhaps one of the most compelling value propositions of Aircall is that it gives companies the on-demand ability to virtually expand (and contract) numbers of agents, agnostic to any location with Internet access. Call centers are no longer tied to physical locations–they can now be a single remote agent or teams of 100+ stationed anywhere in the world, in any language.

NextWorld Capital is excited to partner with Aircall’s CEO Olivier Pailhes and his team for the next chapter ahead. Aircall is truly democratizing the customer call center for companies (big and small), consumers, and agents alike.

*DISCLAIMER: The portfolio companies identified and described herein do not represent all of the portfolio companies purchased, sold or recommended for funds advised by NextWorld Capital. Certain portfolio companies may be kept confidential for various reasons, including contractual or subject to a non-disclosure agreement. The reader should not assume that an investment in the portfolio companies identified was or will be profitable.

Not all acquisitions or IPOs are profitable; the positions can be acquired at a price that is greater or less than the price at which NextWorld Capital purchased its interest for client accounts. The information is being shown to reflect the firm’s ability to select investments and not to reflect any positive investment experience.

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General Partner @NextWorldCap. Data-first investor @Prosperworks @Gong_io @Aircall @Datameer @Honeycombio @DataStax @AgilOne @BrightRoll