French startup iAdvize just raised $16 million (€14 million) from Iris Capital, Bpifrance and existing investor Alven Capital. This company is all about making your online customer service experience suck less.
iAdvize automatically detects visitors who need help and alerts your team members. Then, customer support representatives can contact their website visitors. 2,000 companies are using the product. With iAdvize, you can also add click to chat, click to call and other buttons to your website.
“E-commerce represents around 10 percent of brick-and-mortar shopping,” co-founder and CEO Julien Hervouët told me. “Yet, 40 persons out of 100 make a purchase when they go into a store. On the Internet, it’s just 2 percent, or 20 times less.”
Some of the company’s clients include Cdiscount, LVMH and Boursorama. The more these clients rely and use iAdvize, the higher it costs.
Today’s funding round will be used to greatly expand the teams. Started in France, the company now plans to hire 100 people in the U.K., Germany, Spain and then the U.S. It already has 120 employees.
Going forward, the company will fine tune its platform. iAdvize will be able to monitor what customers are doing on the web, mobile and on social networks. The startup is currently implementing Twitter and Facebook support. Expect some big product news in early 2016 as well.
iAdvize competes with LivePerson. The American competitor claims to have 18,000 clients. So iAdvize still seems to be smaller than LivePerson.
If you have used a chat support feature on a French website, chances are iAdvize was powering the service. The company started tackling this market pretty early as it was created in 2010. Now, it needs to convince big international companies that they should trust the company’s solution. While this is no small feat, the user tracking technology could be a serious advantage compared to local European competitors.
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