Solemar Andrade: CEO Plusoft believes in more humanized automatic interactions (Plusoft / Disclosure)
In the world of technology startups, Plusoft is a veteran who lives off reinvention. Like Zendesk, it is that type of company that is invisible to consumers, but crucial in interacting with companies. The customer service company started 33 years ago and evolved along with technology, through phone, fax, e-mail, social networks and messaging applications. Like many in the industry, it also adopted customer service concepts based on customer experience, offering automated service features that solved the problems of consumers at companies that hired their services. To do this, Plusoft joined the wave of chatbots, service robots that use artificial intelligence resources and solve common problems in seconds. But, with the pandemic that hit the world in 2020, a sea of new customers came to the digital environment and, again, came to yet another reinvention. Plusoft is now starting to put aside the customer experience and focus on humanized experience.
To accomplish this, the company bet on more technology. She adapted the chatbots to make them more like a human being. The chatbot can have an avatar, a character, and it can work differently depending on the case, with technical or more colloquial language. The company also allows chatbots to have voice interactions and, for this, has adapted them to different Brazilian accents and regionalities.
In the wave of humanization of service, the company also offers video call interactions with attendants, but without giving up the records required by law for any service, such as recording and protocol number, with data that may have been integrated into the corporate client management system. from the company. “We continue to produce cutting-edge software, but they are made for people to use correctly, and not for engineers,” says Solemar Andrade, Plusoft’s CEO, in an interview with EXAM. Plusoft enables communication with customers on 17 digital channels, such as WhatsApp, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and ReclameAqui.
With this trend, you may ask yourself: is it the end of human service? Not for the time being. Although the service is automated, there is always the possibility of service by a human being for specific cases, something that happens even in companies that have self-service as a differentiation in the business, as is the case of fintechs like Nubank.
The chatbot market is not entirely new, but it continues to expand at a rapid pace. The sector ended 2020 with a global turnover of 17.17 billion dollars and will reach 102.29 billion dollars in 2026, maintaining a compound annual growth rate of 34.7%, according to a forecast by the American consultancy Research And Markets. The report points out that companies seek to establish lasting connections with their customers through these service robots to maintain a long-term relationship with customers and create stable sources of revenue in these channels. In 2020, chatbots played an important role in customer service because they offered agility in the provision of services and allowed to rapidly expand the service capacity in the digital environment.
According to a survey conducted by the American magazine MIT Technology Review, 90% of American companies surveyed that use chatbots reported more agile problem solving than before the adoption of this service technology. The Accenture consultancy points out in a study that 57% of participating companies had a high return on minimum investments in chatbots, which makes service robots a low-cost and large-scale option for companies that work with sales and customer service via the Internet.
In the wake of the growth of chatbots, Zendesk has consolidated itself as one of the largest startups in the industry in the United States. The nature of the company’s business is similar to Plusoft’s: promoting the connection of customers with companies through digital channels. And customer service is already worth more than $ 1 billion for the company.
With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation in companies worldwide, after overcoming this milestone for the first time in 2019, Zendesk’s revenue in 2020 stood at 1.03 billion, a 26% growth from one year to the next. The company has large partnerships, such as Netflix, Slack, Zoom and Discord, as well as clients such as the Duolingo language app, the sports brand Puma and the Brazilian paper and cellulose company Suzano.
“The use of artificial intelligence resources helps to prevent the reopening of attendance tickets in up to 65% of cases for our customers”, says Rogério Perez, customer success director at Zendesk for Latin America, in the EXAME Tech podcast.
With 7.3 million new customers buying in Brazilian electronic retail in 2020, customer service in the online environment is only going to grow. Whether on WhatsApp, Facebook or any other application.
