Tallinn-based startup Klaus is a conversation review and QA platform for customer support teams, improving customer service quality by making internal feedback easy and systematic. Founded in 2018, Klaus has raised €1.7 million from Creandum, with participation from Icebreaker and several angels, including founders of Pipedrive.
Klaus plugs into leading help desk platforms enabling companies to increase customer service quality by systematically going through past interactions with customers and giving feedback to agents.
Co-founders Martin Kõiva and Kair Käsper built Klaus as a solution to a pain point they experienced while working together at Pipedrive, a leading CRM startup.
“After four years of building up the support function and hiring over 100 customer facing professionals, it became clear that the best way to ensure consistent quality is to have a high-quality system for giving feedback to agents,” said Martin Kõiva. “Engineers have code review, content writers have the editorial process, support teams now have conversation review.”
Having launched the product only six months ago, Klaus is already seeing rapid growth, with customers including Soundcloud, Trivago, Wistia, and Figma. The founders report that over 200,000 conversation reviews have been done so far on their platform, and attribute the momentum to unmet demand created by the rapidly changing industry landscape.
“In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of companies have made the switch to cloud-based software such as Zendesk or Intercom and that wave is really only starting to build up,” said Kair Käsper. “What we’re seeing is that after doubling down on efficiency the focus turns to quality. Companies that have gotten started are now struggling because they run their QA programs on spreadsheets. We’re here to fix that.”
Klaus provides companies a quick way of getting started with a quality assurance program by connecting to popular help desk software. It allows companies to easily filter out conversations they want to review, rate them based on a customized score card and notify agents that received feedback automatically through email or Slack. For companies that already have a process in place, it promises to cut the time spent on reviewing one conversation by 70%.
“Klaus makes our review processes much more manageable, less time-consuming and as a result: much more likely to actually be done,” said Valentina Thörner, customer service team lead at Automattic, the makers of WordPress.
With the newly added funds Klaus is aiming to gain visibility and expand its technical team to focus on developing new features aimed at providing smarter ways of rating and filtering conversations.
Creandum’s investment comes from the newly announced $300 million Creandum V fund and is the companies first investment to Baltic states. It has previously backed companies such as Spotify, iZettle, and Neo Technologies.
“We see customer service moving more and more over to conversations & real-time communication,” said Lauri Lehtmaa, investment manager at Creandum. “Traditional lagging indicators like CSAT scores are not sufficient to provide insights to the quality and consistency of support to team leads and agents alike. Klaus is a game changer that enables companies to be more conscious in building world class support teams & culture thanks to better insights. We’re proud to partner up with Martin and Kair on that journey.”
