Bangalore: Richpanel, a customer service platform for the ecommerce industry, has raised an undisclosed investment as part of Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, a rapid scale-up program for startups in Southeast Asia and India.

Founded in January 2019 and headquartered in both India and the US, Richpanel was created with the purpose of helping ecommerce companies scale business without hiring more agents. The platform allows merchants to design an account page on their online storefront where they can automate order tracking, exchanges, returns, cancellations, and any other scenario which would otherwise result in a support ticket.

While tech giants like Amazon and Uber have made massive investments to automate their purchase and post purchase flows such as “where is my order” or “change trip destination”, these kinds of queries result in support tickets for most other businesses who rely on a team of agents and a ticketing system to handle them. Richpanel’s platform helps these businesses launch a self-service portal on their stores, allowing customers to perform actions without having to contact a support agent. This means small and medium sized businesses can scale their operations without constantly expanding their support team.

Richpanel’s solution is an alternative to other help desk software, as well as customer care outsourcing services available in the market today – areas where businesses are expected to spend $110B by 2024.

The platform also provides an agent inbox that allows support reps to handle the cases where customers need to speak with a person. The agent inbox helps brands manage all their support channels – email, live chat, social media & phone – from one place. The integration with ecommerce platforms helps agents see complete purchase history, take order actions and respond to customers from one screen.

“The first time I disputed a cancellation fee on a ride-sharing platform, I mentally prepared myself for a 15-minute-long chat with a support rep, but I was pleasantly surprised when the entire process took less than 60 seconds. This automated customer service support technology can save ecommerce businesses millions of dollars, and we felt there was a real need to productize this for everyone else,” saidAmit RG, CEO at Richpanel

“At Richpanel, our goal is to help clients eliminate unnecessary support tickets. Businesses have tried chatbots, FAQs and help center solutions, but what they need is a solution that does not ‘deflect’ customers but ‘resolves’ their issues. Currently, our platform is able to resolve 40-50% of incoming queries, but we believe that we can eventually take this up to 80%,” Amit RG added.

Clients such as US-based apparel company Pawz.com are seeing positive results with Richpanel.

“As one of Richpanel’s early adopters, we have been extremely happy with the platform and the team’s ability to deliver well on projects. Currently, our self-service flows powered by Richpanel are able to close nearly 60% of all incoming queries or tickets, without the need to interact with an agent,” said Julian Quintães, CEO at Pawz.com.