Casengo Raises $2M To Accelerate One-Inbox Approach To Customer Service

Casengo is a cloud platform for customer support aimed at online retailers and other small businesses to respond to customer questions faster. It does this by creating one inbox for customer chats, emails and social media posts. In theory, this speeds up response times, especially when customer teams are scrambling around trying to deal with the same single enquiry coming in via different channels like email and social media. It’s now had a €1.5 million ($2 million) from a consortium of European investors led by VC firm henQ.

The problem they are solving is a customer’s tendency to go nuclear on social media when they don’t hear back fast enough. “By treating social media posts with the same importance as emails, companies are on their way to gain more happy customers,” says founder Floris van der Even. And he has a point.

Emails can be turned into chat conversations, with or without a chat button on the website. Casengo sends all messages, wherever they come from, straight to one single team inbox.

Casengo mixes support software like Zendesk, Desk.com and Freshdesk (in some sense also competitors) with chat applications like Olark, Zopim and LiveChat. Over 2,300 companies worldwide now use the cloud application.

Herman Hintzen, executive partner of venture capital firm henQ Invest says Casengo’s efforts in developing semantic algorithms and mining big data “really triggered us”.

Casengo’s founders, Floris and Thijs van der Veen (who are brothers) previously launched Livecom, a customer support application aimed at large enterprises such as Philips, BMW and ABN AMRO.