SaaS startup Airwoot classifies 'social chatter', offers customer support via social media

Gurgaon-based SaaS startup Memetic Labs Technologies Pvt Ltd is all set to offer enhanced customer support in real time via its social media listening and analytics platform called Airwoot, a top executive of the company told Techcircle.in.

Incubated at The Morpheus, the Airwoot platform enables brands to set up a customer support channel on social media, helps generate only relevant tickets and segregates social chatter into marketing campaigns, praises and spams, claimed co-founder Saurabh Arora, who set up the firm with Prabhat Saraswat in December 2011.

Airwoot will be officially launched in March this year and the platform will be open for user signup, said Arora.

Arora holds master's degrees in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and Technical University of Denmark. His partner Saraswat is a post-graduate in Computer Science from ETH Zurich.

"In traditional technology, each social mention ends up into a ticket. An agent will then manually siphon out irrelevant tickets. In contrast, Airwoot generates only relevant tickets and segregates the social chatter into marketing campaigns, praises and spams," explained Arora.

According to him, Airwoot employs sophisticated language processing technology to filter relevant support queries from social chatter, automates and prioritises ticketing for a quick and hassle-free answering and powerful performance, and provides listening analytics to improve a brand's overall health.

"Airwoot is built on a real-time collaboration platform where multiple agents from different departments of the enterprise can collaborate together to quickly resolve customer complaints on social media," said Arora.

The revenue model will be based on monthly subscription. The company currently employs four people and is actively looking to expand its team. In August 2012, it also launched Barometer, a real-time online tool which gauges a brand's customer support performance on Twitter.

Airwoot is already running a pilot with an e-commerce player in India and is in talks with another firm in the telecom sector. "Customer support through social media is still an emerging trend in India. But it is poised to grow as Indian brands are now recognising the value of customer service excellence. They realise that customer interaction now exists across different platforms and devices, and it is critical that they should adapt to it to become more nimble and transparent," noted Arora.

He also feels in the next few years, Indian enterprises will focus more on customer happiness and will spend 10-20 per cent of revenues on customer care. Building repeat customers will be another focus area. "We spotted this trend quite early and have tailor-made the tool to handle customer support on social media. Airwoot is a helpdesk-as-a-service on top of social media that matures into a business process enriching the bottom line and enables brands to connect with their customers on their preferred social media channel," he concluded.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)