We’re excited to announce our partnership with and investment in Kustomer. Kustomer is a New York City-based company building the next-generation of customer support platform.

In my first role at Google, I provided account management and customer support to internet publishers.

I remember trying to understand the context around a particular customer case. How large is the customer? What recent interactions have we had with the customer? How satisfied are they? Who is the point of contact? Which products are they using? The information was found in five or six different systems.

I also remember trying to remediate problems. Some were simple. Password reset or account balance inquiries. But others required coordination with different systems and teams: refunds and policy review. Orchestrating those processes isn’t easy.

Kustomer is the software I wish I had when supporting customers. Brad, Jeremy and the rest of the Kustomer team have operated in the space for more than a decade. They were founders of Assistly (with our partner Alex Bard), and became executives at Salesforce’s Service Cloud after Salesforce bought their business.

They have seen companies of all types and sizes struggle to find the right way to support their customers. The product of all that experience and knowledge is Kustomer.

Kustomer has a flexible data model to ingest all relevant data to a customer interaction, from web visits to mobile interactions, from transactions to event attendance.

Kustomer couples this data store to a powerful process engine that enables orchestration and automation of other systems. For example, customer support reps can process a return and create a new order at the click of a button.

This is a powerful combination. It’s the reason companies like Ring, Slice, Glossier, SmugMug and others trust their most important relationships - those with their customers - to Kustomer.