Verloop.io’s Year In Review – 2020
Verloop.io’s Year In Review – 2020
2020 wasn’t an easy year. As a business, the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged many markets and institutions – some beyond repair.
The pandemic also brought about another big change by way of an all-time high adoption of work-from-home.
As companies shifted to remote-first work setups, they needed solutions that could make the move with them.
A specific focus was placed on automation – to be able to serve customers round the clock without needing a human agent on at all times.
Solutions and solution providers that specialized in automation became the gold standard for the market in 2020.
And while a lot of the optimism from our 2019 Report seems bittersweet in retrospect, Verloop.io had one of its most defining years yet.
Achievements from Last Year
CEO’s Office
One of the most critical metrics for a company’s long term success is how happy our employees are. Given the pandemic and how much we grew as a team (we averaged one new team member every week for about 50 weeks), it’d be very easy to assume that, on average, employee metrics like satisfaction or engagement would fall, but we’re happy to report quite the opposite.
According to xto10x, Verloop.io boasted the 3rd highest ever eNPS score received by any company in the <100 employee category. You can join our team by exploring the careers section.
High growth companies are hard; building one during covid is much harder. We have a tough job to keep the growth going while ensuring that everyone is well cared for.
Gaurav Singh, CEO, Verloop.io
In 2019, one of our major moments of pride was our expansion into the Middle East & North Africa region. We’ve come a lot way since then – in 2020, we were one of the biggest chat automation processors in the region. And this growth will only continue, with the establishment of our new Abu Dhabi office + Verloop Labs Limited.
We’ve also enjoyed exceptional client evangelism this year, as is evidenced by the myriad of awards we’ve received on G2 Crowd this year.
Last but not least, raising a Series A round from Falcon Edge was a tremendous opportunity and we’re glad to have them by side on this journey. You can also access our media coverage Verloop.io in the news for all the latest updates.
Product
Deepak Singh – Head of Product
This year was incredible for Product at Verloop.io. We built and launched more products than ever before – and we’re looking to build on this number next year.
We developed a great shipping momentum through the year, and that really shone through in the third week of December when most teams are slowing down for the end of the year.
In that time frame, however, the Verloop.io team shipped 5 separate features in a single week (apart from bug fixes and improvements).
Here are some of the more notable builds from 2020 (choose 5 and explain)
- Canned Response
Canned Responses are pre-populated, ready-to-send responses that provide an easy way to respond to repetitive customer queries. With Verloop.io, you can create, organize and save your responses as commands, messages, tags and departments to find the most relevant response in just a few clicks.
- Omnichannel CSAT
Verloop.io now allows you to collect feedback from your customers on channels like WhatsApp and Facebook. Once a conversation is closed, your customers will receive a feedback link where they can provide both their rating and subjective feedback. These scores will automatically reflect on your CSAT widget in the dashboard.
- SSO
We have enabled SSO for you and your team so you don’t have to remember a bunch of annoying passwords. All you have to do is, remember just one set of credentials to log in to Verloop.io, anywhere, anytime.
- Deflected Chats
In 2020, we also announced a new dashboard metric called Deflected chats that tells you the total no. of chats resolved/auto-closed by your bot. This lets you understand the efficiency of your bot with respect to your agents on the go.
- Reports
Verloop.io allows you to schedule and download not just regular but also ad hoc reports at your convenience. You can select custom date ranges, view reports from the past, send ad-hoc reports, and do more to derive insights about your support team.
Engineering
Ashwin M – DevOps Head
As we scaled, we faced no shortage of engineering challenges as an org. It took real grit and grind attitude to continue being as enterprise-effective as ever, combined of course, with many sleepless nights.
We reduced our principal logging costs by 20% by building a brand new logging and monitoring cluster using only open source tools.
In an effort to maintain GDPR compliance for a leading UAE bank, we replicated our AWS deployment + services to the GDPR compliant Azure in just 3 weeks. We can now provide locally GDPR compliant customer support automation to customers in the area with even more ease.
Standardized CI/CD pipeline for even faster and safer releases.
Customer Success
Udit Agarwal – Head of Customer Success
We doubled our CS team this year, and I’m grateful to say we stuck the landing. We’ve seen major increases in all major retention and revenue statistics, while also increasing our new-client several fold and reducing onboarding times by similar amounts.
Our new clients are even bigger and even more geographically diverse than they’ve ever been. We’re excited to increase those numbers on both counts as we rapidly expand into SEA and the West.
Partnerships
Deepak Ravindran, Head of Partnerships
We started Partnerships this year and we’ve hit the ground running. Verloop.io has made major strides in that regard, creating partnerships with Microsoft, Google & Capillary amongst others. We’re actively looking to make technology partnerships, so if you’re reading this and you’d like to partner with the world’s leading support automation platform, hit us up.
There’s a very famous Silicon Valley quote – “software is going to eat the world.” Looking at 2020, I think we can expand on that quote – “Chat is going to eat the world.” I believe chat’s going to continue to flourish through conversational commerce. Especially through lockdown, we’ve automated customer support solutions for a lot of businesses. There’s a huge opportunity, I’m very excited for that.
Deepak Ravindran, Head of Partnerships, Verloop.io
We’ve also built partnerships in the Middle East and are looking to forge new ones in SEA.
We’re also hiring for that very role – international partnerships – so if you’re interested in joining a fast-growth organization, drop me a mail.
We’ve opened our doors to startups with our Verloop.io for Startups plan, so we’re also partnering with VC and incubators to help promising companies get a leg up over competition by delivering excellent customer support.
Marketing
Siddarth Sharma – Head of Marketing
One of the things I’m most proud of is how much we’ve been able to scale demand generation, nearly 4x without increasing our headcount. It shows how much potential this team has and how much farther we can go with the right triggers.
We’ve also had a bunch of cool “firsts” this year for marketing – our first event, first benchmark report, first podcast, amongst several others. GITEX was a tremendous success and the team had a great time executing it. Our benchmark report went positively viral (by B2B SaaS standards) and the podcast received rave reviews from listeners, guests and critics alike.
We’ve also set up a great marketing structure for next year that I’m very keen to build on.
Cool stuff in 2021
2020 was a great year for us. We grew as a team, as a company and as a family.
But we have even more great stuff lined up for next year – and so here’s a sneak peek at a couple of things that you can expect from Team Verloop.io.
A new website + branding – One subtle change you may have noticed if you’re particularly astute is that we moved from “Verloop” to “Verloop.io” in all company communication. We made this change because we felt Verloop.io was more representative of our solutions and offerings. This is a small change, but it is part of a broader effort to cement our position as the world’s leading customer support automation platform. So keeping checking out www.verloop.io for more.
This year laid a foundation of many product/tech pieces and also a solid team, which should help us build faster, iterate often and delight our customers & users. We have a solid pipeline of improvements from a new refreshing and functional UI to a self-served analytics platform and new areas such as voice to text. This year we expect a 5-8X improvement on product & engineering
Deepak Singh, Head of Product, Verloop.io
Voice Support – Being able to chat with a company to have your support issues resolved is incredibly important. But it’s also just as important to allow you to do it over call too, should that be your preference. In 2021, Verloop.io will expand its voice support automation massively, in a manner that combines our expertise in resolving customer support queries while bringing a fresh new channel for maximum customer ease.
More markets, more people, more customers, more channels – Bringing the joy of excellent customer support to as many people as possible is the vision that drives Verloop.io. And as we get better at building those quality end-to-end support experiences, in 2021, we want to bring that expertise to even more companies, countries and channels.
New UI/UX, new dashboard, new bot builder, better analytics – The value of the people who actually use our product cannot be understated. So in 2021, we’re committed to building quality products that make their lives easier – from administrators to managers to agents. This starts with an updated, simple-to-use dashboard, that features bespoke analytics tailored for specific companies. We’re also making major changes to the bot builder, so it’s easier for you to make bot flow changes in a world that’s always changing.
Lots more video & events – One of the major changes you’ll see in 2021 for Verloop.io is a move to more video content. We’re setting things in place to not just attend more on-ground events (safely, of course), but also build a platform so that Verloop.io can host events too.
All in all, 2020 was a difficult year. For us at Verloop.io, and I’m sure for you reading this too.
But the bright side is that 2021 will only be better. We’re grateful to everyone who’s supported us this year – from our investors to our colleagues and our customers. But most of all, you, the person reading this.
We hope to see you in 2021.
