Q&A with Gorgias - helpdesk automation software

In this post we are talking to Romain Lapeyre, co-founder and CEO of Gorgias, Techstars '15 company from Paris, France.

1. What is Gorgias in 140 characters?

Gorgias is a helpdesk software that makes agents 2 times more efficient.

2. Why did you start the company?

My co-founder Alex and I both worked in customer support and experienced how repetitive it can be. That's why we decided to build software to fix this.

3. What does your product do?

Gorgias automatically suggests how to solve common support requests. This way, agents simply need to approve the suggestion, to solve a case. For email addicts, we've built a Chrome Extension that's a flavor of what Gorgias is. Try it and save time in your inbox!For every support request received, Gorgias surfaces the information you need to decide how to treat it, and suggests macros to respond to it.Our helpdesk is will be available in private beta soon. Contact us at hello@gorgias.io if you’d like take it for a spin.

4. What makes your technology defensible?

We developed a proprietary Machine Learning algorithm to group customer requests and suggests what to respond to them (think Google Inbox for Customer Support). We also have a developer friendly API that makes it easy to integrate with our customer’s services like payment systems (Stripe/Paypal/etc...) and their own custom backoffice.

5. Who are your customers and why do they use your product?

We work with e-commerce websites, on-demand services and marketplaces. They use our service because they have a ton of support requests that are all very similar, and they are looking for ways to be more efficient at dealing with those.Our customers include Classpass, Plated & Kinnek.

6. What are your key KPIs and how did you choose them?

We focus on the number of companies that use our product on production, and MRR.We chose these because they are aligned with our ability to increase the productivity of our customers.

7. What is your long-term vision for the company?

We want to automate most of the manual work that agents are currently doing. We think the way agents do customer support is going to change: they will no longer have to spend time on repetitive actions and will focus more on supervising the support process. Our end goal is to enable any business to deliver high quality support at scale.

8. What is your advice for fellow founders?

Get your customers engaged with your product as soon as possible. This will trim a lot of your false assumptions. Then focus on growth.