Jan 22nd 2014, 12:30, by Ingrid Lunden
Intercom, a platform for companies to provide personalised customer responses online, is today announcing that it has raised another $23 million — funding that it will use to continue to develop its product and expand its marketing to compete better against bigger players like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce (the behemoth that even uses ‘CRM’ as its stock ticker on the NYSE).
The Series B round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and includes participation from previous investors Social+Capital Partnership. The company, which was originally incubated at 500 Startups, also counts the likes of Biz Stone and Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin as investors. This round brings the total raised by Intercom to $30 million.
Intercom is among a new wave of companies that are generally called “social CRM” providers — the idea here is that everyone in your organisation should be able to communicate his/her knowledge to customers when and if it is needed. This means not only better engagement from your employees in the bigger team effort, but also more satisfying responses for users.
The evolution of CRM comes at a time of growth but also maturation of the internet: consumers expect better and more personalised responses. It’s a space ripe for change, says Intercom’s co-founder and CEO Eoghan McCabe (who hails, along with the other three co-founders, from Dublin):
“CRM companies haven’t innovated in over ten years. Many of them are just ticketing systems. But what’s happening is that customer service is at the leading edge of great competitive online businesses,” he tells me. “In past, leadership was based on top engineering and good design. But today, the real leaders are those like Zappos people spend more there because they know they get to deal with a human.”
Since coming out of beta 18 months ago, Intercom has picked up 2,000 paying businesses, among them Heroku, Hootsuite, Yahoo!, Perfect Audience, Rackspace, and Visual.ly.
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