Kustomer Delivers Seamless Support Experiences

“With PubNub, we know that we get a quality, robust solution and a mature platform that solves all of our problems." Mark Waldron, Senior Engineering Manager at Kustomer

Meet Kustomer 

Founded in 2015, Kustomer is a personalized customer service platform used by innovative and recognizable brands across multiple industries—like Glossier, Ring, Hopper, and Sweetgreen. Their software equips both customers and agents to deliver the exceptional, quick service that today’s customers expect.

“We pride ourselves on being an omnichannel CRM that allows customers to jump between all different platforms like chat, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, or SMS,” said Mark Waldron, Senior Engineering Manager at Kustomer. “Anywhere your customers are, we are there to provide them support in the best way possible.”

As a way to enable this seamless communication, Kustomer relies on PubNub to power support chat, push notifications, and other real-time features necessary to provide a high-quality customer experience. 

Powering a reliable and scalable chat platform to support growth 

Before PubNub, Kustomer experienced some observability issues with their previous solution, like customers missing messages or not receiving notifications. As a result, their CX team began to look for another solution to help them implement a more reliable and scalable platform for their customer service chat.

“Our previous solution just wasn’t right anymore, as we are continuously expanding,” said Waldron. “With PubNub, we know that we get a quality, robust solution and a mature platform that solves all of our problems, like scalability."

But now with PubNub, they are able to deliver customer support features like agent-to-customer chat and automated chatbots without having to worry about scalability or latency issues. 

“The only other option was to build the real-time features ourselves, but we didn’t want to spend the bandwidth required for that,” said Waldron. "It has been more than worth it to go with PubNub."

Leveraging real-time features to resolve requests quickly

Kustomer’s team initially deployed PubNub using Chat SDKs, and have since used PubNub’s wide range of SDKs to build everything from their one-to-one agent and customer chats to their intelligent KustomerIQ chatbots for web applications, iOS, and Android devices. 

Aside from alerts for new chat messages, Kustomer is also able to notify agents if they are mentioned by a customer that they have previously interacted with, or when another support team member needs assistance for an issue they have helped with. Additionally, Waldron and his team have continued to roll out other real-time features like in-app notifications, alerts, and typing indicators to help drive better results for their customers. These updates ensure that agents are able to assist quickly and continue to build relationships with and improve customer experience.

Waldron and his team also leverage PubNub’s real-time dashboards to quickly identify possible issues, ensuring that their customers don’t experience delays or downtime. “PubNub has made it a lot easier for us to support our customers,” said Waldron. “We are provided with a lot of tools that promote visibility into the health of our platform and the amount of traffic that we're sending.” 

With real-time dashboards, support team members are able to see how many other agents are online, how many conversations are ongoing, and have the ability to retrieve message history from conversations within the last 30 days—providing agents with the visibility and knowledge they need to efficiently solve problems.

Building a customizable support chat that improves efficiency

Looking ahead, Kustomer is confident that they can continue to scale and iterate their chat platform, enabling support team members to improve efficiency and resolve requests quickly. And knowing that they can count on PubNub’s Solution Architects and technical support team to help them implement additional real-time support features is essential to Waldron and his team. 

“Whenever we have questions, we can message our Solutions Architect and they quickly answer anything we need help with, from onboarding to implementation,” said Waldron. “PubNub’s team is always there to support us along the way.”

If you are interested in building a customizable, fully-featured chat solution that improves customer experience, try our APIs for free.