Rob Velasquez, Awesomatic
Customer support is getting more and more complicated for business owners, as the mediums through which it is conducted are increasing every day. Awesomatic offers an intuitive solution that helps to manage all of the aspects necessary to keep your customers satisfied.
What services does your company offer?
Awesomatic aims to make customer service more human and scalable. We currently provide an in-app customer service tool that fosters conversations between your customers.
What were you doing prior to Awesomatic?
My background is in product design and development. I've been out in the Bay Area for several years, and I've been lucky enough to work at some great startups like
BitTorrent and
Storenvy.
How did you start your business? Where did it all happen?
We all know what it's like to try to get a question answered online nowadays—it's all about automation and template-based responses. I was already working on a real-time collaboration tool, so when it came down to getting feedback on it, I started to look at some of these solutions and I couldn't believe that this was how technology companies were choosing to interact with their customers. It started to become obvious that the same technology we were already building could be used to solve this problem, as well. Since then it's been about consolidating some of these early ideas and focusing 100 percent on getting the experience around customer service down.
What differentiates you from your competition?
Everyone else is focused on automation and low-touch support. We're allowing companies to create all of these great, real-time conversations between their customers. You end up building a community around your application and empowering your customers to resolve issues for each other at the same time.
Are there any local resources that have been essential to you?
When it comes down to it, marketing and customer service are overlapping more and more. There's no better place to be when it comes to understanding consumers than Cincinnati because of
all of the major brands that are rooted here. This is core to so much of the success in the consumer market: Your customers have to love you and your product—they have to become passionate about it. This is fundamental to what we're trying to create within the software experience ,and the visibility into this thinking and the knowledge we've been exposed to by being here has been extremely valuable.
What's next?
We're continuing to grow while in beta and are continually looking for more companies to work with closely. So if you're interested in innovating when it comes to customer service and providing a better experience, feel free to be in touch.
Interview by Sean M. Peters
Photo by Zackariah Cole Photography