Zingly launches a bold AI-driven future of customer experience for a world beyond 1-800 calls and chatbots

San Francisco, California – June 6, 2024; Ex-Avaya, Five9, Glia, and Talkdesk industry leaders join forces to revolutionize customer experience (CX) with the launch of Zingly, a Collaborative Customer Experience (CCX) Platform. The patented customer-facing technology combines GenAI, digital interactions, and telephony, providing infinite scale to enterprises, and hyper-personalization to consumers, resulting in revenue acceleration and lasting customer relationships.

With this launch, Zingly is today announcing it has raised a $10m seed funding round from Dell Technologies Capital, WestWave Capital, Scribble Ventures, Formus Capital, Geekdom Fund, Array Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Burst Capital, and from leaders in the CX industry.

Today, customers are still primarily required to call 800 numbers and punch numbers into an interactive voice response (IVR) whenever they need to communicate with businesses. For customers, phone calls are an outdated and frustrating experience, and for businesses, they’re an expensive and unscalable method of communication. Meanwhile, businesses are seeing 10x traffic on their website and apps while experiencing declining call center traffic.

Technology advancements in CX have typically focused on operational savings driven by cloud migration and agent support tools, but have often neglected the end customer. Zingly rectifies this imbalance by providing customers with Zingly-Rooms™—a patented, always-on space where customers can instantly connect and collaborate with businesses, eliminating the need for calls.

This is driven by the company’s Generative AI product technologies, including Relationship-AI™ and Zingly-Buddy™. Zingly focuses on eliminating friction and accelerating engagement use cases like customer acquisition, onboarding, customer service and success, and many more. This is done through a modern no-code-low-code platform that integrates into any tech stack (CRM, existing contact center technologies, customer support systems, and core operations) and intelligently combines cutting-edge Generative AI, humans, and data. The end result is an innovative collaborative space that can scale to support service and sales operations for businesses of all sizes, while providing hyper-personalization for customers.

Founded in 2021 by Gaurav Passi, a former executive at Avaya and Five9, Zingly was born out of a recognition that traditional contact center solutions were becoming obsolete. With global inflationary pressures driving up the cost per call and limiting scalability due to the finite number of agents, the need for industry disruption was clear. Passi teamed up with seasoned CX, CRM, and CCaaS leaders from Five9, Talkdesk, and Glia to launch Zingly.

“Traditional contact center solutions are out of date and simply not personable for customers, or scalable for businesses. The math is clear, there are approximately 16.5 million call center agents globally handling potentially billions of customers. More importantly, the frustration and long wait times associated with traditional calling and rigid workflow-driven chatbots have created what we call a fear of reaching out (FORO) among customers. Our vision with Zingly is to destroy FORO and make it collaborative for customers and businesses to come together,” said Gaurav Passi, CEO and founder of Zingly.

“Zingly represents a significant leap forward from the traditional trade-off between personalization and scalability in CX. While traditional calls are unscalable and conversational chatbots can feel too robotic, Zingly offers a new CX paradigm that is faster, cheaper, and more secure than both 1-800 numbers and conversational AI chatbots” added Gaurav Passi.

Currently focusing on high-value industries such as financial services, healthcare, and product companies, Zingly is able to help organizations modernize their customer experience seamlessly by integrating with their existing technology stacks. As an example, Zingly is working with a Fortune 500 provider to engage with 5x more customers than traditional 1:1 phone conversations, while also reducing typical conversion time from 60 to 18 days, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of revenue uplift. Most importantly, it allowed them to innovate on top of their core infrastructure like Salesforce and Avaya without any disruption.

“To truly revolutionize CX, it needed top industry leaders like those from Zingly to step back and fundamentally reimagine a new approach. Incremental improvements to CX were not enough. A deep technology solution intelligently combining data, GenAI, and humans, as well as a dedicated team of CX experts together with forward looking Fortune 500 design partners was required for such a revolution,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research.

“The vision presented by Zingly happens once in a decade. We are excited to partner with the team right from its inception”, said Gaurav Manglik of WestWave Capital. While Gokul Rajaram, Board Member at Coinbase and Pinterest, and former executive at DoorDash and Square added: “What I respect about Gaurav Passi as a leader and Zingly as a company is that they have had the same mission from day 1. They work closely with large complex enterprises to solve deep challenges, and as a result, have built the best platform to disrupt the much needed CX industry with clear ROI. This clarity of mission and singular focus has been a big reason for their continued success.”

Looking ahead, Zingly is rapidly expanding its teams in data science and engineering, sales, and marketing with plans to double its headcount by the end of next year. On track to be driving millions of quality customer interactions this year, Zingly is accelerating its mission to help companies collaborate with their customers and build relationships bigger than business.