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Airwoot drives real-time customer support via social channels

The Delhi-based startup touts a powerful semantic engine which filters and classifies social media mentions to help brands manage their online reputation management real-time.
Written by Srinivas Kulkarni, Contributor

Customers engaging with brands on social platforms has become a norm these days. No matter what domain you're into, this is an area which will keep on expanding. But many times, even on social, owing to lack of the right tools and volume of data that is out there in terms of customers' social chatter, one of the major challenges for brands is interacting with their customers in real time. 

That's where this Delhi-based startup, Airwoot, an engineering startup is trying to radically improve the way customers engage with the businesses today. They claim to be doing this with the combination of data science and user experience offering a smart customer service helpdesk which enables brands to deliver effective and real-time customer support on top of social media. Co-founder, Saurabh Arora, shared more details about this startup in an email interaction. 

"We started out by algorithmically mining consumer buying intentions from Twitter, in order to predict the next money spent. While on it, we realized more consumers were found complaining about the product than accepting and endorsing the product," said Arora.

They then started tracking thirty-five most active international brands on Twitter and realized that they were not able to handle the social engagement appropriately with often slow and ineffective responses. It was only when they studied the tools which these brands were using to do social customer support, that they realized that there was no optimized solution out there for brands, and hence they came up with Airwoot. 

According to Saurabh, and rightly so, today's customers are highly opinionated, always on the go and ever connected. Through social media they can reach out to a brand wherever they are.

Airwoot uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning techniques to pick out the actionable conversations in real-time. It automatically identify people who need engagement in real-time. And that's not it, the more you use it the smarter it gets. Airwoot capture your social etiquette and creates a social priority inbox for you.

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Airwoot's workflow.

 

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One of their products Barometer is a realtime infographic tool that listens to the people talking about the top Indian brands on Twitter and analyzes their key social performance indicators. The sophisticated infographic gives deep insights how they perform on Twitter. It is a self explaining and comprehensive health check-up of the brands customer support which they provide on Twitter. 

Barometer key social performance indicators:

  • Social Buzz
  • Average time to get a response
  • Requests &responses this week
  • Tweets to solve a problem
  • Immediate Resolution
  • Sentiment Index trend 

While there are many social media listening and analytics tools out there, AirWoot specifically focuses on real time consumer engagement. "At Airwoot, we have built a powerful semantic engine which filters and classifies each social media mention in order to figure out if it requires the brand response or not," said Saurabh.
 
Currently Airwoot targets enterprises who have setup their presence on social networks in order to proactively engage and provide customer support on social media. 

  • Customer support requires:
  • Tracking of users and their previous contact points.
  • Maintaining service levels associated with response times, customer satisfaction.
  • Team collaboration to share and solve customers problems together.
  • Analytics to track and measure brand health.

These are the requirements that AirWoot aspires to tackle effectively and efficiently according to the co-founder. They launched their service in October this year and have already acquired few of the prominent brands of India including Snapdeal, Makemytrip, Shopclues, Paytm, and etc.

According to Arora, their brands are able to achieve a higher quality of engagement, 4 times faster response timesm and 3 times better customer satisfaction.

Airwoot got incubated at "The Morpheus" in August 2012 and has recently closed first seed round from some of the prominent angel investors of India including KAE Capital, Sasha Mirchandani and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan. Social is rapidly evolving and so are the metrics which impact brand health, too. In the next phase of development they plan to provide brands with real-time actionable insights from the social media which helps them use customer interactions as a direct feedback into their business processes.  

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