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Company: Pypestream, Inc. (customer engagement software)
Company description: Pypestream is a customer engagement solution founded in 2015 by Richard Smullen to help enterprises establish a trusted direct to consumer relationship. The company provides a two-way persistent connection via private messaging with AI-backed conversational experiences, or “pypes.” Pypestream is dedicated to meeting consumers where they are by providing an on-demand, mobile-first experience with the brands they buy from and the businesses they trust. The Pypestream platform digitally transforms legacy companies into on-demand powerhouses through automating customer service, marketing and promotions, and business to employee engagements across a variety of industries.
Pypestream is a privately held company headquartered in New York City. Smullen serves as founder and CEO of the organization.
Markets: SaaS, Customer Engagement Solutions, Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise smart messaging, Technology, Customer Service
International Operations: None
Product and Services
Pypestream Customer Engagement Platform, Pype Manager, integration with third-party systems, high-level security compliance, rule-based and statistical NLP, agent escalation, internal and customer-facing use cases, Customer Enablement, Certified partners, PypePro Services
Key Features
- Pypestream Customer Engagement Platform: Pypestream secure and compliant platform, provides conversational commerce solutions for sales and marketing, for customer service, and for employee services.
- Pype Manager: Pypestream’s proprietary dashboard that measures performance and quality of customer interactions, through real-time analytics. The dashboard can be leveraged within pre-existing agent consoles utilizing chat logs, routing logic, and integrations as well as display CRM data to inform messaging interactions and manage all communication in one place.
- Integration with third party systems: Pypestream’s platform has open APIs and was designed to easily integrate with external systems like messaging platforms, backend systems, and CRMs. For example integration with messaging touchpoints (Facebook messenger, Skype for business, text/SMS, and brand mobile apps); integration with backend systems to support billing, transactions, ERP, and any other industry specific platform (Guidewire, Shopify); and integration with CRM/Live agent platforms (Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Live Agent, SAP Hybris, Zendesk, Freshdesk).
- High-level security compliance: The platform is built on top of AWS leveraging all of its built in security mechanisms. We are also HIPAA, GDPR and PCI compliant.
- Rule based and statistical NLP: We use tone classifiers to understand the sentiment of the users and redirect them to the best decision/path for optimal experience.
- Agent escalation: If the user in a bot automated conversation cannot have their question answered or problem solved adequately the chat can be escalated to an agent. The agent is able to see the previous interaction between the user and the bot and is able to see what the user is trying to achieve and is able to provide more personalized and adequate customer service. The agent also has the ability to customize canned answers to improve their efficiency without sacrificing the quality of service.
- Internal and customer facing use cases: The Pypestream Customer Engagement Platform offers a variety of use cases across multiple verticals. Enterprises can leverage Pypestream for marketing, customer service, or business to employee communications as well as for insurance, telecom, retail, healthcare, and many other industries. The service offerings within these use cases is numerous including allowing for users to get insurance quotes, register for events, conduct transactions, and interact directly with their company or Human Resources representative.
- Customer Enablement: Pypestream will train the customer on how to build and customize conversations using the self service tools.
- Certified Partners: A customer may pick a certified Pypestream implementation partner (e.g. EY and Deloitte)
- PypePro Services: Pypestream’s customer experience team will deliver a turn key solution.
Insight and Analysis
There is very little analysis of Pypestream software yet available, largely because of the relative newness of the company. Industry website Predictive Analytics Today has an assessment here. Most of the ratings of various parts of the solution (ease of use, features and functionality, integration, etc.) have performances ranked in the 7 range out of a possible 10. Here are some highlights:
“Pypestream is a secure two-way messaging platform that offers customer engagement solutions that connects customers to their businesses through the power of smart messaging. Pypestream is a compliant and secure platform that combines chatbots with pragmatic AI, therefore enabling transactions over messaging.
“Pypestream ‘s … patented framework separates communication into topic-specific channels. This will enable enterprises to broadcast their messages to a mass audience.”
In March 2018, the company released its latest version of the platform, Proteus, which enables enterprises to define their own sensitive data-masking and redaction rules to allow the solution to support other use cases like billing, payment, account management, loyalty and e-commerce. A further advancement to the platform is the Digital Robot Training Center, a new toolset which allows enterprises to build, deploy and maintain their own automation robots. Enterprises are now enabled to build and deploy automation to multiple channels, improve the AI engine, enhance conversation flow and adjust robotic processes in real time.
IT Central Station and Gartner Peer Insights have no reviews of Pypestream.
List of current customers: Sling, Lincoln Center, Pampers, Royal Caribbean, Oral-B
Delivery: Pypestream offers on-site implementation with its Customer Experience team in which they conduct workshops and teach agents and department managers how to most successfully use the technology. Pypestream also offers certification in which an organization’s representative can lead the implementation of the platform. Finally, a certified partner (EY, Deloitte, LTI) has the ability to lead the implementation program. The process is determined on a case-by-case basis. The integration also depends on whether the customer is using the Pype Manager dashboard or their own console.
Pricing: The pricing model is composed from onboarding fees, platform usage, and support and maintenance.
Pypestream does not charge by API calls or individual messages. It charges by session, which is a number of messages that accomplish users purpose. Onboarding fees depend on the customer-specific use case, and the number and type of systems to be integrated with. Typical onboarding starts at $40,000. Platform usage is based on the number of sessions being handled by the system.
Other key players in this market:
- Avaamo
- Kore.ai
- Solvvy
- Conversica
- msg.ai
- Chatfuel
Contact information for potential customers: Zvi Moshkovitz at [email protected]; office phone (866) 444-7973
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