Pylon announced this week that it had raised a $3.2 million seed investment to continue to develop its data management software for customer conversations in Slack.
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As B2B conversations have shifted from email to communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord, they have also become harder to track.
Pylon enables organisations to manage these messages, with a Zendesk integration that allows support tickets to be created when necessary.
The company was founded in November 2022 and it was also a member of the Winter 2023 Y Combinator batch, which helps to accelerate start-ups. Other companies that were launched through Y Combinator include, Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Quora, Reddit, Stripe, Twitch, and more.
Advith Chelikani, Co-founder of Pylon, said: “We are building Pylon to help customer-facing teams turn this new mode of interaction into scalable processes that work with your existing tools.
“Manage and prioritize customer conversations, turn messages into support tickets, and send product updates with ease.
“Help your customers get to value faster and retain better, all without drowning in a sea of messages.”
What can Pylon do?
Pylon connects customer operations stacks to chat platforms. If a customer asks a question in a shared Slack channel, Python can detect whether it is a support question, self-serve the customer into a support flow, and open a support ticket within a company’s support system.
As a result, agent workloads are eased by allowing them to work from a single queue, also enabling them to more easily respond in priority order.
According to Pylon, the productivity boost from reduced context switching saves tens to hundreds of hours a month.
Sales and success teams can use Pylon to intelligently sync conversations to CRM and success tools, providing a conversational data feed into customer health calculations, and more.
Pylon shows which customer requests have not been answered and enables businesses to send updates or notifications in bulk across channels.
These include tracking for link clicks and replies, in the same way as you would with email, but with ten times greater engagement rates, according to Pylon.
Pylon is currently focussing on managing Slack conversations because it has the most to manage, but it is planning to provide solutions for Microsoft Teams and other channels soon.
The start-up story
The idea behind Pylon originated from the founders’ previous careers, in which they all saw there had been a shift in vendor and customer communications from email to chat channels.
After speaking to hundreds of software companies, it became apparent that consumer expectations of real-time communications were being replicated in the B2B world.
On the one hand, Slack channels are an excellent way to put buyers and sellers in close contact so that they can effectively live within one another’s workspaces.
Without sufficient tooling, however, the chat channels can grow at an unmanageable rate, as email did before the advent of Mailchimp, Zendesk, and Salesforce.
In the same way these companies provide support for email scalability, Python sees itself in a similar vein, bringing scalability to chat for customer-facing purposes.
