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Cisco joins Helpshift’s funding to boost its contact center business
Like many fellow enterprise technology giants, Cisco Systems Inc. has a venture capital arm that backs various initiatives and startups with the potential to advance its goals. The newest name in the company’s portfolio is Helpshift Inc., an in-app customer care provider that helps organizations cut the amount of resources they spend on supporting mobile users.
The startup revealed today that Cisco Systems Inc. has joined the $23 million Series B round that it had announced back in June. A specific dollar amount wasn’t provided, but a spokesperson told SiliconANGLE that the the networking giant’s contribution bumps the firm’s total raised past $38 million.
Given that Helpshift’s outside funding stood at $36.2 million before the cash infusion, Cisco must have added somewhere between $1.2 million and $1.7 million to the pile. The company joins an already impressive list of backers that includes the venture capital arms of Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. as well as several leading funds.
Cisco plans to follow up its contribution by launching an effort to explore how Helpshift’s mobile support software could help its contact center automation business. The networking giant offers several tools for routing calls, improving the productivity of support personnel and analyzing operational performance. Adding integration with Helpshift could potentially make its products much better-equipped to handle in-app interactions.
The startup’s service provides the ability to build a WhatsApp-like support interface into applications that saves users the trouble of opening a separate window to contact the help desk. Moreover, companies can leverage Helpshift to create an embedded knowledge base with answers to frequently asked questions.
The latter feature aims to cut the number of tickets sent to a firm’s contact center and thus reduce the workload on agents. Helpshift Chief Executive Abinash Tripathy told VentureBeat that only 2.4 million of the 50 million users of Helpshift’s largest customer needed to get live chat support, meaning a big reduction in support costs.
Image courtesy of HelpShift
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