And along with the seed round, Kaizo (which rebranded last week from its former name, Ticketless) is announcing that Christoph Auer-Welsbach, a former partner at IBM Ventures, is joining the company as a co-founder, alongside founder\u00a0Dominik Blattner.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Although this is just a seed round, it\u2019s coming after a period of strong growth for the company. Kaizo has already 500 companies including Truecaller, SimpleSurance, Miro, CreditRepairCloud, Justpark, Festicket and Nmbrs are using its software, covering \u201cthousands\u201d of customer support agents, which use a mixture of\u00a0free and paid tools that integrate with established CRM software from the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk and more.<\/p>\n Customer service, and the idea of gamifying it to motivate employees, might feel like the last thing on people\u2019s minds at the moment, but it is actually timely and relevant to our current state in responding to and living with the coronavirus.<\/p>\n People are spending much more time at home, and are turning to the internet and remote services to get what they need, and in many cases are finding that their best-laid plans are now in freefall. Both of these are driving a lot of traffic to sites and primarily customer support centers, which are getting overwhelmed with people reaching out for help.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s before you consider how customer support teams might be impacted by coronavirus and the many mandates we\u2019ve had to stay away from work, and the stresses they may be under.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our current social climate, customer support is an integral part of a company\u2019s stability and growth that has embraced remote work to meet the demands of a globalized customer-base,\u201d said Dominik Blattner, founder of Kaizo, in a statement. \u201cWith the rise of support teams utilizing a digital workplace, providing standards to measure an agent\u2019s performance has never been more important. KPIs provide these standards, quantifying the success, achievement and contribution of each team member.\u201d<\/p>\n On a more general level, Kaizo is also changing the conversation around how to improve one\u2019s productivity. There has been a larger push for \u201cquantified self\u201d platforms, which has very much played out both in workplaces and in our personal lives, but a lot of services to track performance have focused on both managers and employees leaning in with a lot of input. That means if they don\u2019t set aside the time to do that, the platforms never quite work the way they should.<\/p>\n This is where the AI element of Kaizo plays a key role, by taking on the need to proactively report into a system.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is how we\u2019re distinct,\u201d Auer-Welsbach said in an interview. \u201c<\/span>Normally KPIs are top-down. They are about people setting goals and then reporting they\u2019ve done something. This is a bottom-up approach. We\u2019re not trying to change employees\u2019 behaviour. We plug into whatever environment they are using, and then our tool monitors. The employee doesn\u2019t have to report or measure anything. We track clicks on the CRM, ticketing, and more, and we analyse all that.\u201d He notes that Kaizo is looking at up to 50 datapoints in its analysis.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wordpressdynamos.com\/timesofnewscdn\/blog\/32271_personal-agents-training-space.png?resize=640%2C473&ssl=1\")
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