Elloe’s Sakawa is Helping Customers Start a ‘Friendship’ with their Favorite Brands
Did you know that you can start a ‘friendship’ with your favorite brand? That’s just what Owen Sakawa, Founder and CEO of Elloe, is all about. In an age that has seen the fall of the stony-faced corporate brand, and the rise of ever more personalized customer engagement, it makes sense that the future of company-customer relationships is moving closer to something that looks more like a ‘friendship’.
But how does this work? Is it even possible? We grabbed some time with Owen to ask him what exactly is a “customer friendship” platform, the future of conversational AI, and building an international team.
How did the idea for Elloe come about?
Elloe was founded in response to a growing disparity between how consumers were forced to communicate with their favorite brands and how they preferred to communicate with family and friends. Phone calls are inconvenient and time-consuming. Email is inefficient and impersonal. Conversational messaging is how people communicate with their family and friends. Elloe was created to make it as simple as possible to communicate with businesses.
What makes Elloe unique?
Elloe is the first and only Autonomous conversational AI platform built to handle customer conversations equally well across channels which helps create great experiences for both customers and agents. We believe customers are delighted by natural, personalized conversations with your enterprise that quickly solve their problems. Despite two generations of chatbots and virtual agent products, the customer experience delivered still feels unnatural and generic. To address this problem, we set out to create the first fluid and natural conversational experiences that would transform self-service customer experiences into surprisingly great ones.
Every customer in the world deserves these delightful experiences we envision, which is why we’ve built our solutions to scale for the enterprise. We’ve eliminated the manual work brands have to do, through a fully autonomous conversational AI platform. Our goal is to go beyond No Code Conversational AI to Autonomous No Code Conversational AI, which does most of the work for the enterprise
You talk about creating “friendships” between brands and customers. Do you think this kind of more personal, and less ‘transactional’ or ‘commercial’, relationship is possible?
Absolutely. Elloe uses intelligent routing and workflows powered by data and algorithms so conversations reach the right agents along with relevant data and insights to provide further context. That means agents can focus on being present and friendly which creates better experiences for both agents and customers. It’s also valuable to the brand itself. Reaching out to customer service is often the most direct and human interaction people have with their favorite brands, so the higher the quality of that interaction is, the better.
Customer-centric services are becoming key for startups and large corporations. At what point do you think customers started expecting personalized services?
The sheer abundance of choice has prompted consumers to expect more from their favorite brands, as it’s easier than ever for them to take their business elsewhere. Also, consumers are becoming more aware of their data being stored and what companies use it for. They expect a certain degree of personalization in exchange for their data. They’re even willing to spend more on great experiences making the customer experience just as important as the price or even product itself.
Having built an international team with different nationalities, are you all based in one office, or do you also work remotely?
Our team is spread across five countries: the United States, Kenya, London, India, and the Philippines. We have adopted a remote working culture, and all of our teams work from home.
Do you think these circumstances will change the way customer service (or tech startups in general) work in the close future?
This crisis, I believe, is making businesses more aware of not only the possibility of working remotely, but also of the need to do it well. Technology has enabled us to do almost anything from the comfort of our own homes. The next step is to ensure that processes are not jeopardized as a result. Elloe, for example, not only enables brands in handling interactions across multiple channels. It also facilitates knowledge sharing and task delegation when team members are not in the same room.
What do you predict for your industry in the next 5–10 years?
Customer experience will continue to be critical to businesses’ overall success and the brands that can establish “customer friendships” will thrive. Retaining customers and turning them into loyal brand advocates is the best way to ensure long term success, especially as competition continues to grow across industries and the likes of Amazon always being able to offer lower prices than most. The personal relationship and trust built between brands and customers is the great differentiator. The tech companies that build the tools supporting hyper-personalized experiences at scale will also reap the benefits.
What’s next for Elloe?
We have spent a lot of time perfecting our unique algorithms and building the leading Autonomous Conversational AI platform, enabling intelligent and efficient customer interactions at large scale. While this has significantly boosted customer satisfaction, customer retention and productivity for our exciting portfolio of customers, we aren’t stopping there.
Unlike many other teams, we started all our work after the release of transformer-based, pre-trained large language models such as BERT and GPT. We bring not just Natural Language Understanding (NLU), but truly comprehensive NLP (including Natural Language Generation, or NLG) into our modern platform for Conversational AI. We hope you enjoy this exciting, game-changing journey of creating much better, quicker, cost-optimized customer experience.
Autonomous, self-driving cars may still be a dream, but autonomous, Conversational AI is here, now. Our goal is to enable brands to delight customers more strategically, rather than spending time on the tedious task of building natural, fluid conversational virtual agents. We hope you enjoy this exciting, game-changing journey of creating much better, quicker, cost-optimized customer experience.
Do you have any advice for founders currently fighting the good fight in Kenya?
A company is only as good as its people. Invest in building a strong company culture, it will have a tremendous impact on your success and be a guiding force when your organization is faced with adversity. In Elloe we’ve put a lot of effort into creating an inclusive and transparent environment, which we have relied on more heavily in these past weeks with everyone isolated at home. Invest now in a few necessary areas and make sure your capital and cost foundation can sustain a crisis that could take months. These are important tactics to ensure your company comes out stronger on the other side of this crisis, both culturally, financially, as a brand and product. And of course, make sure you use cloud-based tools that can support big changes to how you work.
Finally, How can our readers follow you on social media?
I am active on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as all of Elloe’s channels, including the blog. Feel free to DM me.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
