SupportLogic Channel Chief Talks SaaS, New Partner Program, More

Dave Feliu is fairly new to his position as channel chief at SupportLogic, a company that has created technology to predict and prevent customer escalations. Feliu has more than 20 years’ experience in the channel. Since he took the SupportLogic role in October, he’s wasted no time in developing, as he describes it, a “boutique” partner initiative.

SupportLogic’s Dave Feliu

Feliu has rolled out the Partner Experience Plus, or PX+ program, which provides a “white glove approach” to developing partnerships. In three months, the company has garnered seven new partners and plans to get to 20 by year’s end. As Feliu puts it, “I really want them to feel like they’re being paid attention to. And over the years, I’ve found that gets difficult to do the larger your organization is. So we’re going to do a lot with fewer, more focused partners that we can really work with day in and day out.”

SupportLogic’s existing partners include CSS Corp., a global customer experience (CX) company, and Arcsona, which helps financial institutions use big data.

SupportLogic provides customers with a support experience platform, one that integrates its software with that of companies such as Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Slack and Microsoft Teams. They have relationships with big players, but SupportLogic’s executives still call the five-year-old firm a startup. Last October, SupportLogic got $50 million in Series B funding to expand the technology which, in basic terms, helps contact centers, or support centers, decipher heaps of data. The company will also use the money to hire across sales, marketing, engineering and product departments, as well as for R&D, Feliu said. Additionally, it will use the funding to support marketing efforts to further establish the support experience (SX) category.

What has SupportLogic accomplished since it founded? Typically, it has helped companies like Snowflake, Nutanix, Databricks, and Fivetran reduce overall contact center escalation by 40%. Case review time is down by 65% and operational costs have seen a 35% reduction for some of these companies. Their clients experience 25% reduction in churn.

What makes SupportLogic unique among the other companies providing AI-powered software support? Feliu discusses this. He also tackles how the pandemic has influenced the company, and why SupportLogic’s technology is beneficial to both retain customers and employees.

Channel Futures: What makes SupportLogic different compared to other firms in the SaaS space?

Dave Feliu: SupportLogic is really the first of its kind. We’re creating our own category as the first support experience management platform. Essentially what that means is we’re using AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NPL) to extract signals from customer interactions. We then predict with pinpoint accuracy which cases are going to escalate. So, when it comes to the support experience, historically there has been very little visibility into the voice of the customer. That’s what we’re solving for today.

In the support world, the cost per ticket varies from company to company. It could be a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars. If companies are experiencing 20%-40% of their cases escalating, it becomes incredibly costly. Also, it’s potentially damaging to their reputation.

CF: On the company’s website it says that there are more than 30 signals your AI models look for to determine escalations. What are some of those signals?

DF: Our AI models are going to look for things like a sense urgency. It will pinpoint different words and phrases that help the model determine whether a customer is likely to churn or if a customer is likely to escalate. It’s not just flagging words; it’s also looking at context. Just because someone said “angry” doesn’t make it an angry customer. We’re re-reading the ticket in near real time. When I say near real time, I mean that the ticket is …