Ido Bornstein-HaCohen, CEO of Conversocial, Speaks to The Silicon Review: ‘Our Singular Focus is to Enable Brands to Deliver Conversational Customer Experiences over Messaging Channels’

“With our platform, clients can redefine customer conversations with one-to-one, personalized experiences.”

Conversocial, a conversational CX platform, empowers brands to build customer relationships over private messaging channels.

The company was founded in 2012 and is based in New York. It has an additional office location in London.

Interview Excerpt: Ido Bornstein-HaCohen

Q. How do you help brands deliver better customer experiences over private messaging channels?

Today, customers wish to interact with brands in the same way they interact with their family and friends—over messaging apps like Messenger, SMS/Text, WhatsApp, etc. They demand two-way communication at their own convenience, eliminating the archaic, never-ending phone trees and impersonal mass marketing.

However, the path to achieving one-to-one, scalable, conversational CX is far from straightforward. At a time when COVID-19 has drastically changed everything, brands are struggling to increase their online presence and provide great customer experiences without the associated exploding costs. As a result, most brands are stuck with legacy customer engagement channels like live chat, email, and phone—and struggle to implement messaging. Our platform combines four key capabilities that enable brands to deliver personalized conversational experiences over private messaging channels, making customer engagement simpler.

Empowered Agents (on Messaging Channels): Conversocial’s Agent Workspace provides agents with all the tools they need to deliver exceptional services. It employs a rules-based routing system that automatically distributes conversations based on intent to the right individual (i.e., team or bot), allowing agents to concentrate on the most important and relevant conversations.

Automation at Scale: After acquiring the pioneering messaging automation platform ‘Assist’ in 2019, the Conversocial platform expanded to include industry leading capabilities that enabled us to build bots across major messaging apps, all from a single source. Our system was developed to ensure “sorry, I don’t understand” is a response confined to the past.

Conversational CX: Brands don’t just have to be reactive when it comes to a customer’s immediate needs. Conversocial’s Notify—a two-way communication engine—turns messaging into a proactive channel, enabling brands to send the right message, at the right time, to the right consumer, without having to wait for them to reach out first.

Data Driven Decision Making: To help companies better understand their customer interaction performance, the Conversocial platform offers a full suite of reporting tools to measure the quantitative and qualitative data from customer feedback. The platform also offers an open architecture, allowing clients to integrate their support stack with the Conversocial Connect API.

What’s more, Conversocial has established strategic partnerships with the world’s leading messaging app providers such as Facebook, Apple, and Google, so rather than using traditional, omnichannel strategies for customer communication, our approach focuses on utilizing channels that billions of people across the world already use to connect.

Q. Given that your technology is best-in-class, how do you empower brands to seamlessly integrate bots and humans from a single platform to deliver superior customer experiences?

The Conversocial platform can seamlessly integrate agent-assisted services with bot-based automation, all within a single conversation. How do we do this? Conversocial bots are adaptive and flexible, interacting with customers and navigating without a predefined path. These intelligent bots know when to resolve an inquiry or perform a smooth handoff, providing the right combination of agents and bots within one conversation. Let the bots provide the convenience, let the people provide the empathy—the key is delivering services and experiences that seamlessly allow the two to work in unison, enabling the customer to provide as little effort as necessary to get what they need.

Q. What can you tell us about your Conversational CX platform?

Conversocial helps brands deliver conversational experiences over messaging channels. This means reducing inbound phone calls, eliminating service emails, untethering live chat, and creating unique experiences that drive revenue—all while improving customer satisfaction and decreasing brand costs. With our platform, clients can redefine omnichannel engagement with one-to-one, personalized experiences.

Q. How is Conversocial differentiating itself from other industry competitors?

At Conversocial, our singular focus is to help brands deliver better customer experiences over messaging channels. We pride ourselves on delivering the know-how, coupled with best-in-class technology to empower your brand to seamlessly integrate bots and humans from a single platform to deliver superior customer experiences. More than that, our team is composed of experts who will be your brand’s strategic partners from day one. We have proven experience in transforming platforms, processes, and people and helping hundreds of companies navigate the necessary complexities of delivering exemplary customer experiences over private messaging channels.

Q. How can brands measure success using the Conversocial platform?

To help brands gain insight into their customer interaction performance, the Conversocial platform offers a plethora of reporting tools. These tools measure the quantitative and qualitative insights from customer feedback (i.e., CSAT & NPS) while comparing your CX efforts to that of your traditional channels. The platform’s real-time dashboards offer complete visibility into both the agents' and bots' performance, allowing managers to make decisions faster, ensure SLAs are met, and that customers are ultimately happy.

Q. Could you describe your typical management style and the type of employee that works well with you?

A company is all about its people.

We believe in giving people control — making them feel safe to voice their ideas and opinions — and shaping a culture where great ideas can manifest anywhere, anytime. We push ourselves to make sure everyone, at all levels, is heard. We strive to ask the right questions to help everyone think freely and evangelize their ideas internally.

What makes for a great team member at Conversocial? We are a group of passionate, committed, and curious people. Our passion is everything. It’s what keeps us going, it’s what makes our team come up with so many ideas, and it’s what causes us to say, “what if...” a lot. Our curiosity is why we thrive in our space; we always look to learn and explore new ideas. Finally, our commitment is our special sauce; we see it when having other’s backs, and we see it when bringing solutions to our clients that blow their minds. Exceeding expectations is in our DNA — no one at Conversocial likes to do the bare minimum; we’re just not built that way.

Q. How is your company staying up to date in the industry?

Our mission at Conversocial is to enable brands to deliver exceptional conversational experiences (Conversational CX). What does that mean, and how is it related to building customer relationships? When we think about traditional platforms, they are built for managing customer relationships based solely on passive or reactive engagement — i.e., brands responding to a customer reaching out to them. But good relationships are two-way streets. The difference between managing and building relationships is proactive and preemptive conversations.

At Conversocial, we will continue to simplify and enhance the ways the brands and consumers interact. We will utilize our platform’s best practices to continue improving how we support agents and will continue to enhance the way our bots interact with, and in turn delight, our consumers. But this is just the beginning of the journey. Currently, we focus primarily on messaging platforms like Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Google, etc., because that is where your customers are. But that doesn’t mean we stop there; we’re already looking at new channels and ways we engage, such as voice assistants and home assistants. Perhaps the future of communication will head in a very different direction beyond that of verbal or written. Whatever happens, you bet Conversocial will be ready.

The Leader Upfront

Ido Bornstein-HaCohen is the CEO of Conversocial. With a B.A. in Computer Science and an MBA cum laude from Hebrew University, Ido is an industry thought leader with more than 15 years’ executive experience in the customer engagement and CRM space.

In 2017, Ido joined Conversocial as COO to lead the commercial team and just two years later was promoted to CEO. In his current role, Ido defines Conversocial’s global strategy and its execution, continually seeking to improve and simplify the way brands and consumers connect. Ido achieved significant success growing and scaling companies through leadership positions at LivePerson and SAP. He currently lives in the NYC area with his wife and their two boys.

“We pride ourselves on delivering the know-how, coupled with best-in-class technology to empower your brand to seamlessly integrate bots and humans from a single platform to deliver superior customer experiences.”