Providing customer support can involve using some ugly and awkward apps and interfaces, and so India-based SupportBee proposes to make it a smoother process whereby communicating with customers becomes friendlier and easier. Co-founder Prateek Dayal, demoing onstage at our Startup Arena, says that the SupportBee.com web app makes giving support more like “having conversations” for SMEs and their customers.
This helps, explains Prateek (pictured below giving his pitch to our judges), companies to maintain a “human face” when dealing with us regular folks. And so its interface deliberately resembles Gmail (pictured above), which is both something familiar and well adapted to virtual conversations. Its support ticket stream is thereby simplified into something that many of its users will recognize, and features some other straight-forward features such as tags/labels, a spam folder, and starred items.
After revealing the help desk secret sauce, SupportBee’s Prateek reveals a “disruptive pricing” scheme of charging by the number of tickets, rather than a flat fee for SMEs to make use of it. The site is now in public beta after a private testing phase, and says that many companies are making use of it, with many of those having opted to convert to a paid subscription.
Going forward, the four-person team has plans to launch an open API [UPDATE: My mistake - the API is out already] and thereby encourage app plugins available via an upcoming app store. And so it’s ripe for expansion into a broader customer support platform.
This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, our startup event running on June 8 and 9. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, on our Facebook page, on Google Plus, or via RSS.