8Flow.ai Raises $6.6M to Automate Customer Support Workflows

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Working in customer support often means juggling disparate tools to find data and solve problems. However, many of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automation. 8Flow.ai, which launched in stealth today and announced a $6.6 million seed funding round, wants to do just that.

The company deploys an enterprise-grade, self-learning workflow automation engine that integrates with tools like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Salesforce Service Cloud to assist agents in their day-to-day work. But that’s just step one. The company will then use all this data to train machine learning models to generate his AI-driven workflows tailored to each user’s needs.

Image credit: 8 flows

“Ultimately, our goal is to build tools that learn what agents are doing today,” 8Flow co-founder and CEO Boaz Hecht told me. rice field. “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a support agent, a finance person, a human resources person, or whatever. It’s about building an engine that looks like it’s learning to build a model that’s rich enough to use.”

For now, though, the team is still focused on Phase 1 and optimizing the user interface and experience. Hecht said this has already helped agents quite a bit, creating enough value for companies to pay for their products today. Additionally, 8Flow can capture data and collect feedback.

“The idea is that we’re collecting data, so we’re collecting feedback. So we’re iterating on behalf of the agent what they’re doing. ‘, he explained. “And while they’re doing it, we watch what they do, and then we build it — I think it’s like building Lego blocks from the bottom up I almost think of it as — we learn what kind of blocks we need to build, once we have the bricks we learn how to put them together, and when we put them together, we learn that you See what you’ve built and rebuild them into pre-built workflows.”

Image credit: 8 flows

Currently, this takes the form of a Chrome extension that can automatically copy and paste relevant data from one application to another. The tool automatically learns each agent’s common procedures and presents them as actions that can be triggered with a single click.

As Hecht pointed out, for example, it may take dozens of clicks for a support agent to respond to an order return, but most of the steps involve copying and pasting data from one application to another. Since it’s a matter of pasting, it should actually only take a few times. It takes just a few steps for the agent to make a decision (for example, whether to issue a refund). Ideally, a tool like 8Flow lets agents focus there.

“8Flow has enabled my team to significantly improve efficiency and accuracy,” says Heather English, senior customer support manager at FloorFound. “Using 8Flow saves time by not having to switch between browser tabs to copy and paste data, as it frees up more valuable time for his team members with each release.” , excited about the roadmap going forward.

Businesses will also benefit further by getting data on which tools agents are actually using (and which ones can be canceled because they are not being used) and how they are using them.

Image credit: 8 flows

Hecht is no stranger to workflow automation. He was also co-founder and CEO of He SkyGiraffe, an early enterprise mobility platform. SkyGiraffe, in 2017 he was sold to ServiceNow. He then remained at ServiceNow until March 2022, eventually becoming Vice President of Platforms and leading the company’s team. Core He focuses on platforms, mobile, AI chatbots, and most employee products. But by late 2021, he had decided he wanted to launch another startup, and SkyGiraffe and his former ServiceNow colleague he brought in Josh Russ and Yev Goldin to co-found the company.

8Flow’s current focus on support agents is primarily because it’s a market the founding team knows best, but there’s no reason why it can’t add similar value to other verticals of business.

8Flow’s seed round was led by Caffeinated Capital, with BoxGroup, Liquid2, HNVR and Trilogy also participating in the round. A number of high-profile angel investors also participated, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu, and Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli.