The Problem
Communication with the customer is an important part of sales. This is especially true if deal terms or product characteristics need to be discussed before the purchase. At this stage, the sales consultant is playing a critical role. But what to do if you don’t have enough salespeople ready to answer customer questions or their involvement is questionable. For example, can your salespeople effectively speak to a customer in French or Italian if their first language is English?
The Solution
Nowadays, most of the communication is done through chat systems, messengers, social networks, or email. Latest large language models (LLMs) now can communicate at the human level on a variety of topics and in different languages. That makes naturally possible to use these LLMs from OpenAI, Google, etc in a variety of chatbot assistants.
However, for these tools to become a product, they need to be integrated with the communication channels first. Also they need to be specifically sharpened for communication on the topics directly related to sales of a given product.
Our today’s company – ON (https://onplatform.com/) is a San Francisco, CA-based company formerly known as GameOn Technology. This company efficiently caught this trend and was able to integrate AI bots with different channels helping their customers dramatically increase their business metrics.
The company is on the market for 10 years and their initial niche was sports industry. The company was focused on boosting customer engagement and sales through support chats and social networks. Recent trends in AI allowed them to further improve their services using Bard (Google), ChatGPT (OpenAI), and possibly other models.
According to company numbers, they achieve a 10X increase in CTR conversions, compared to industry average numbers; up to 95% of customer inquiries are resolved without staff involvement. At the same time, they are able to deliver up to 70% increase in revenue, in particular by increasing the share of ticket sales, after communicating with the AI-bot, by 40%.
Efficiency improvement for sports industry
What is important here. ON not only reduces the expenses associated with sales and support staff but also enhances the efficiency of these channels. Essentially, ON achieves a significant improvement in two key business aspects simultaneously.
Although the company initially concentrated on the sports industry, they’ve recently entered luxury retail having the partnership with the Armani and Valentino. In fact, this collaboration is likely a key factor behind their impressive latest financing round, securing an investment of $25M.
Like buying tickets to sporting events, luxury purchases are also more carefully vetted by the buyer and require more involvement from the seller.
This is exactly the part where ON’s platform proves useful. The buyer can ask all necessary questions, clarify all the details, and, after all, just discuss the purchase with the AI-assistant before making the decision. AI-bot is always ready to help and provide all necessary information.
According to the company reports they also have impressive figures of efficiency increase in the case of luxury retailing. For example, customer engagement increases by 1/3, the intent to make a purchase increases up to 5 times (however, the company does not say how exactly they measure this indicator); the increase in revenue by 38% when using an assistant and by 92% increase in the speed of resolution of questions from customers.
Efficiency improvement for luxury retail
How it works
The company offers integration of its product with almost all major communication channels – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and others. That is, in addition to the AI assistant itself, is a very powerful and attractive tool for any business because communication in different channels requires significant efforts from the business if there is a lack of such automation.
All of these channels can be connected to a digital assistant from ON, which will be customized to the needs of the customer, i.e. it will have all necessary information about the terms of sale of certain product, its features, purchase options, and will be trained to do it in the most positive and friendly manner to increase the chances of a successful sale and positive feedback from the customer.
Recipe for success
Chatbots are a hot topic right now and we see a lot of startups offering one or the other options to automate customer communication using chatbots and AI. However, ON has its own special recipe for success:
- Over its long history, the company has developed good connections in the world of sports, but most importantly, it has understood the pain points of ticket and season ticket buyers at sporting events. Because of this, it has a good understanding of buyer psychology and it was easy enough for them to customize AI for the needs of communicating with customers in this market.
- The company realized that there are markets in which pre-purchase communication is quite important and made their product geared towards just such a market.
- ON provides easy integration with all major communication channels to which they were able to effectively “bolt on” the AI robot.
- The company claims some pretty impressive numbers in terms of increased engagement, conversions, and revenue. This is especially important. The cost reduction is good, but of particular interest to any business is the increase in key business metrics. By focusing on this aspect of its platform ON can position itself extremely effectively in the market.
What you can repeat in your startup?
If you are thinking of replicating a similar business model, the following aspects should be considered:
- Choose a niche where pre-purchase communication is critical. Usually, these are complex or expensive products or services. For example, real estate, where there are usually a lot of questions and details; health insurance or a credit products; complex home appliance, etc.
- Understand the customer and the product To set up any AI LLM properly you need to understand how sales work in this market and what characteristics of the product or service your AI needs to “understand”. This knowledge is hard to get without being involved in this business for some time, or without close communication with your potential customers.
- Focus on improving business metrics for the business. This would be most important feature of your product and to achieve that use various experiments with your AI-bit collective objective metrics to test your hypotheses.
What to read further
Recently we made a review of another service automating customer service with AI – Siena. That company quickly raised $4.7 million in funding for its AI assistant focused on emotionally engaging conversations with customers.
About the company
Founded by Alex Beckman, Kalin Stanojev, and Nate Simmons. Established in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its ambition is to construct the world’s premier vertical AI/SaaS platform to immediately empower leading global brands with the tools and expertise needed to monetize generative AI and operate it within secure guardrails.
Investors and funding rounds
| Dec 6, 2023 | Venture Round – ON | 4 | $25M | — |
| Dec 1, 2022 | Series B – ON | 11 | $35M | B3 Capital, Mighty Capital, Mirae Asset Venture Investment |
| Oct 15, 2020 | Venture Round – ON | 1 | $7M | WISE Ventures |
| Jul 17, 2020 | Venture Round – ON | 3 | — | — |
| Mar 3, 2020 | Convertible Note – ON | 9 | $10.5M | Quest Ventures |
| Jun 12, 2018 | Seed Round – ON | 8 | — | RHL Ventures, Skystar Capital |
| Jul 14, 2016 | Seed Round – ON | 11 | $2M | — |
| Jan 16, 2016 | Seed Round – ON | 1 | — | Calvin Broadus |
| Aug 6, 2015 | Seed Round – ON | 7 | $1.5M | — |
If you are planning or already building a startup in the field of chatbots and need expertise on your business model, marketing strategy or just need to strengthen your team, we are here to help: