Company News
— 7 min read
Introducing Airkit: The Future of Digital Customer Engagement
Written by Stephen Ehikian, Co-Founder and CEO
Meet Airkit, the world’s first low-code platform purpose-built for customer engagement. Our mission is to make building great digital customer experiences faster and simpler for both developers and business users. In ordinary times, we would be coming to you live from Palo Alto, California with this exciting announcement, but as 2020 has continued to prove, this year is anything but ordinary. Instead, today we share the news of Airkit’s emergence from stealth and our official launch virtually.
Our Story
My co-founder, Adam Evans, and I have always believed the best results come from focusing on the customer. We first worked together at RelateIQ, a company that used customer interaction data to transform the customer from a static CRM record into a dynamic and intelligent relationship. Our vision captured the attention of Salesforce, who acquired RelateIQ in 2014. For three years at Salesforce, our team continued finding innovative ways to unlock and leverage customer data, helping launch Salesforce Einstein.
So we asked ourselves, what if we similarly mobilized companies’ customer data to deliver better customer experiences? Would this be valuable? In fact, wildly successful companies like Amazon, Uber, and Netflix are doing just that. They’ve redefined the customer relationship with hyper-personalized, end-to-end customer experiences that allow users to interact with a platform or product when and how they want. This new method of engagement has raised the bar for customer experience across every industry.
Unfortunately, most established brands are not as agile as Silicon Valley upstarts, and they struggle to meet elevated consumer expectations. While these companies understand what great customer engagement looks like, building those experiences is hard. Developing digital journeys has traditionally involved long development cycles, complex integrations of siloed customer data, and making do with extremely limited engineering resources.
With consumers increasingly favoring hyper-personalized, digital self-service and no relief in sight for strained engineering teams, we set out to create a solution to bridge this gap. This was our opportunity, and we intended to empower every business to easily build world-class digital customer experiences that would rival those of tech giants like Amazon.
Airkit Takes Flight
In 2017, we founded Airkit to eliminate the difficulties of creating great digital customer experiences. Unlike other platforms, we’re people-centric, not process-centric, and our customers and our customers’ customers are the most important factors in shaping our goals. We understood our solution had to accomplish three things: 1) integrate data silos to unlock truly personalized experiences, 2) build end-to-end digital flows to solve consumers’ needs, and 3) orchestrate compelling interactions that span every modern conversational channel. On top of that, we needed to engineer our platform so that companies could trust us with their customers’ information. That is why we made security and compliance a priority from day one, ensuring up-to-date certifications for heavily regulated industries like healthcare, finance, insurance, and government.
Airkit not only has the product and the vision needed to succeed, but we also have the backing. Tier one investors Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures have provided $28 million in funding, recognizing the enormous opportunity we have to capitalize on a $641 billion customer experience technology market1. We also have the talent necessary to build an enterprise-grade solution. We’ve previously launched and sold a successful enterprise software startup and spent several years working for the world’s foremost CRM corporation. Now, we’re using our learnings to power digital customer experiences like never before.
Meet Our Customers
The customer is at the heart and soul of everything we do, and we’re proud to share our customers’ stories. Best-in-class businesses across insurance, banking, transportation, logistics, and real estate industries are transforming their customer engagement on our platform. From Fortune 50 insurers and major financial institutions like First Republic Bank to digital-first companies like SkipTheDishes, Agero, and Turo, we’ve been busy partnering with leading brands to build highly effective digital experiences, resulting in increased revenue and improved scalability, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
We’ve seen first-hand that when you give your customers what they want, the business results quickly follow. With only two quarters of selling under our belts, Airkit clients are experiencing immediate ROI from increasing sales, reducing contact center cost, and delivering digital customer experiences faster than ever before.
- First Republic Bank, a leading bank and wealth management company, is raising the bar of their white-glove client experience and delivering personalized digital options without hiring additional teams of engineers.
- SkipTheDishes, a Canadian meal delivery service, is driving faster onboarding and higher activation rates of restaurants on their platform. When demand accelerated due to the onset of COVID-19, Skip was able to double the number of partners they onboarded per month without hiring additional agents through the use of digital self-service.
- Agero, powering the next generation of software-enabled driver safety services and technology, is improving their handling of highly complex roadside assistance calls by taking more details digitally. With Airkit in place, 40 percent of customers are now choosing digital self-service over speaking with an agent. With our scalable platform, our partnership is expanding internationally.
Our Vision
There’s never been a platform like Airkit. Low-code development has been around for over twenty years, but no one has yet to employ low-code specifically to build end-to-end digital customer experiences, available through any channel and powered by customer interaction data. Airkit is leading the charge.
By making great digital customer experiences faster and easier to build, Airkit reduces the friction of innovation for any company. Why is this important? We believe the next generation of leading brands will be determined by their understanding of customer experience, rather than their access to engineering talent. For consumers, this should result in better service in every industry while reducing costs.
For technical users, Airkit dramatically reduces the amount of tedious low-level code, testing cycles, and integration work, allowing developers to focus on solving business problems. Even more exciting, new categories of professionals will be able to combine insights and customer data with low code to create customer experiences faster and with little help from developers. This is a transformational career opportunity. We’ve seen the power of the hybrid administrator and developer persona that originated from the rise of Salesforce, and we are beginning to form our own community of builders, consisting of professionals from a diverse set of backgrounds, with varying degrees of business and technical abilities.
It should be easy for any business to engineer great digital customer experiences, and with Airkit, it is. We’re not simply building experiences. We’re helping leading businesses connect with their customers in a new, digital way. Reducing friction for customers to engage with your brand is the ultimate goal, and when we achieve it, everyone wins.
Onward and Upward
We’re just getting started here at Airkit. Emerging from stealth today, we are beyond proud to officially launch our product and share the incredible results our customers have achieved in just six months. Looking forward, our goal is to continue inspiring and being inspired by our community of builders as they deliver experiences their customers love. Together, we’ll push the boundaries of digital customer engagement.
Finally, we have an immense sense of gratitude for all those who’ve been involved in our journey so far. Therefore, today we are not only excited to announce Airkit’s official launch, but grateful—to our customers for their partnership and trust, to our investors for their support, and to our teammates for their dedication to a platform, that we believe, is about to change customer experience forever.
