Live chat platform Tagove helps businesses answer customer queries in real time
Tagove is a live chat software that provides video chat, voice calling, and text chat with co-browsing and screen sharing with the customer.
Consumers today are not just looking for a seamless experience, but expect a proactive response and a relationship with brands, products or services. There is a need for urgency in terms of response time that consumers look at.
It was something that Laduram Vishnoi, Amritpal Dhangal and Sawaram Suthar realised when they started their software and app development companies, Just Total Tech. While working at these companies, they encountered several problems in terms of customer communication.
Solving the response lag time
They realised that the lead time to response needed to be shorter and there was a need for instant communication. “We came across many ideas that could remove instant communication gap between customers and companies. Though basic chat software was present for a long time, the time taken to solve small customer queries was long,” says Laduram.
That’s when the trio felt the need for a product that integrated chat, video, text and voice calling with co-browsing and screen sharing with the customer. They then went on to develop live chat software Tagove in 2015.
The idea behind Tagove is to ensure the resolution of customer queries as quickly as possible. This can happen when a customer agent can talk over phone or video and, if need be, even take over a customer’s screen for co-browsing so as to help him instantly rather than downloading all the remote access software.
The team and product
After running the trial and beta version of the software, the team was able to bring on board a few clients with whom they could partner and launch the software. The platform is sector agnostic and works on e-commerce, SaaS business, financial institutions or any possible marketplace.
“At present, we are total 18 people including the development and the sales team. We have four offices worldwide. The headquarters is in San Francisco; the sales office is in London; development, marketing, and support offices are in Ahmedabad,” says Laduram.
Speaking of the challenges the team faced, Laduram says the biggest one pertained to how to manage live chat, especially without downloading any third-party software or plugins.
The system provides multi-channel support including text chat, video calling, co-browsing, and screen sharing. It also has VOIP call facility for those who want to call the customers directly. Says Laduram,
“After going through intense research work, we have designed our live chat software with the latest technologies. Having seven years of long-term experience in software development, we have learned a lot of new technologies like WebRTC, Node.js which ultimately helped me to set up a product company.”
The chat space
Currently, the startup ecosystem is witnessing the growth of chat-based customer services. For instance, in the financial services there are robo advisory services that are looking at chat bots, especially for customer care. In China, one of the biggest players is WeChat.
Smartphone users spend a chunk of their time on chat applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Hike, and WeChat. WhatsApp has one billion monthly active users, Messenger has 800 million, and WeChat 697 million. The limitations with human-based chat is that all agents cannot perform up to the level of best agents.
Tagove, however, is different. Compared to the others who provide only basic chat features, Tagove offers video chat, voice calling, co-browsing, and screen sharing all at once. It's a full-stack customer support software.
The team follows a license-based business model and now claims to have over 300 paid customers like Citibank, Citibank, Penske, ICICI pro-life Insurance (India), Amagi (India), Hyundai, Aster Pharmacy (India and UAE), etc. “We are growing at a high rate of 45 percent more paid customers every month,” says Laduram.
Apart from the initial investment from family and friends, Tagove has received funding from 500 Startups, an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator. The team now claims to be working with artificial intelligence (AI) and Chatbot systems where customers can get help automatically. If AI can't figure out what customers are asking, then they have the video chat or voice calling options.