Airkit Raises $40 Million to Fuel the Future of CX
After more than a year of lockdowns, stores are reopening and brands are putting a renewed focus on the customer experience. Tech firms focused on improving the customer experience are seeing surging interest.
Just this morning, the low-code digital customer experience platform Airkit announced a $40 million round of Series B funding, led by EQT Ventures. The Series B will be used to accelerate the company’s investments in go-to-market and product development. The announcement comes just seven months after Airkit came out of stealth with a $28 million Series A.
Airkit is one of a number of startups working on enterprise-grade solutions for the rapid development of customer-facing mobile apps. Airkit offers reusable components and out-of-the-box templates that brands use to quickly get their digital experiences up and running. Airkit’s building blocks are designed to automate front-end development, so brands can rapidly deploy branded, digital self-service experiences for customer acquisition, care, retention, and growth.
The market that Airkit serves is expanding by the day. According to estimates by Forrester, digital customer service interactions will increase by 40% this year as more brands look to improve their customer experiences.
The growing interest in digital customer experiences among global brands is being fueled largely by customer demand. According to McKinsey, businesses that use technology to revamp the customer experience stand to see an increase in customer satisfaction by 15 to 20%. Digital, omnichannel experiences can also become a point of differentiation for companies, as brands look for more strategic ways to connect the customer journey and reduce operational costs.
A Digital Future
Airkit believes that the future of customer experience is in digital self-service. The company’s leaders have worked to differentiate their startup from the pack by building what the company describes as the “first solution of its kind.”
“With our platform, major brands [can] develop faster, with more pre-built front-end modules and templates for building great branded experiences,” says Stephen Ehikian, co-founder and CEO of Airkit.
Airkit’s platform is also unique in the way it connects with customer data sources and tools, like Salesforce and Genesys. Brands can build experiences that span uninterrupted across web, voice, and chat, with security and compliance built in directly.
Looking forward, Ehikian believes Airkit’s next challenge will be to educate the market about the advantages of the low-code platform and deliver value for brands across a growing variety of use cases. Despite knowing how fundamentally important customer experience is to the overall customer journey, Ehikian says this is an area where many businesses still struggle. The pandemic has exaggerated just how wide the chasm between good and bad experiences is.
“The pandemic has changed the way people think about digital self-service. It has introduced more people to the idea, and for many, it has completely changed how they define and demand great service that meets them where they are in the journey,” he says. “Both these factors are a plus for our business, so as we weather the impacts of the pandemic, we’ll continue to adapt and adopt new customer-centric solutions.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
