Totango launches Zoe, a customer management Slack bot for teams

Customer success management company Totango today launched a Slack bot named Zoe. Available in the Slack App Directory, Zoe facilitates team collaboration and uses natural language understanding to answer employee questions about customer and company data.

The bot can answer questions about important customer metrics, like usage and adoption rates, payments made, subscriptions, activity likely to take place in the future, and so on.

Zoe also helps facilitate what Totango calls “impact steps,” a workflow that encourages departments within a company to organize their own initiatives to address customer success.

“The product is not just a bot and the conversation, it’s also this concept that once I have information about customers and I foster collaboration and participation, we can also organize work around customers to make a meaningful impact,” CEO Guy Nirpaz told VentureBeat in a phone interview. In other words, Nirpaz said, Zoe makes it so that marketing, sales, and product teams can organize from the bottom up and “change customers into causes.”

“So people can publish on a ’cause board’ — think about it as like a board with Kickstarter projects. We call this ‘impact steps’, and this is the mechanism where you put the impact that you want to influence a customer with on a board that everyone else can see, and people can sign up and participate,” he said.

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A select group of Totango customers have tested the bot and its conversational interface over the past six months, Nirpaz said.

The announcement comes at the beginning of Customer Success Summit, a two-day gathering of more than 1,000 CRM and sales professionals in San Francisco that’s hosted by Totango.

Zoe works with the Totango platform and DNA-CX, which provides data modeling and integrations with staff data, CRMs like Salesforce, APIs, and customer data. Zoe uses natural language understanding but also artificial intelligence trained by customer usage of DNA-CX.

“The AI is [built around] the queries of what people ask about the data [and] has been a feature of Totango DNACX before, so we’ve been training this for the past 18 months,” Nirpaz said.

Totango customers today include Autodesk, Zoom, and more than 1,000 other companies.

Totango has 100 employees in offices in San Mateo, New York, and Tel Aviv. The company has raised $32 million since it was founded in 2010.

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Originally published at https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/27/totango-launches-zoe-a-customer-management-slack-bot-for-teams/