You have developed a technology that turns a company’s customers into customer service representatives. How do you do that exactly?
GUURU is a platform for our clients’ digital channels, for their website, their Facebook page, or Whatsapp channel. Our system provides answer requests by chat, it can be either pre- or postsales questions. What we don’t do is phone support. Our algorithm routes standard questions to a chat bot and everything else to human experts, the Guurus. They are recruited from the customer base of our clients and go through a certification process. This represents an on-demand workforce of people who are passionate and knowledgeable about a company’s products.

Since its launch 3 years ago, GUURU has won clients in different industries, mainly tourism, telecoms and e-commerce. E-commerce is the most obvious winner. How does the coronavirus affect your clients in this industry?
We see three distinct ways in which e-commerce is affected. The first and most obvious one is that the demand for existing e-commerce has risen because people order online instead of visiting stores. Our client Brack.ch, one of Switzerland’s leading online shops, falls into this category. Their chat volume has risen significantly. At another client, it has quadrupled in a matter of a few days. The aggregate volume of chats that GUURU’s systems handled in March has increased by 84% compared to the average of January and February.

The second equally important trend is that non-food retailers need to shift their business very quickly from offline to online because their shops had to close. This is true for the do-it-yourself chain Jumbo, for example. The shift from stores to online results in a pressing need to boost online customer service to handle more questions. With GUURU, this can be done very easily. Jumbo was already one of our customers. They didn’t have to change anything, it’s just that now their Guuru community handles more chats for them than before. The third and least obvious impact is on existing customer service organisations, especially call centers.

Are call centers not easily adapting to remote work?
Like many other industries, call centers – with a few exceptions – have never adopted remote working. Some agents might have worked a day per week from their home office, but that was an exception, not the rule. The standard model was to congregate in big open-space offices. This is no longer viable, and some call centers just shut down, while others struggle to get operational again in a remote work mode. We can help these companies.

“Like many other industries, call centers have never adopted remote working.”

But as you explained, GUURU isn’t made for phone support, it is chat-based support only.
Yes, but GUURU can substitute a lot of first level support, up to 80% in our experience. For the majority of questions that people might have, we can take substantial load off a call center. Only if a customer has an issue that requires system access, for example because he has a question regarding invoicing, then our system routes the customer to a call center agent. Because of this, we are well-positioned to help our clients transform their customer support in order to adapt to the massive shift in buying behavior that has been brought about by the corona crisis.

That sounds nice in theory, but are you really able to substitute a major part of the work a big call center with hundreds of agents handles right now?
If our clients want this, we can do it. It would entail certifying more Guurus and enlarging the community. But that is not a problem. At our very big clients such as Sky UK, a British telecommunications company, GUURU has been an addition to their customer service offering. The same is true for other big organisations. But this can change.

Let’s talk about these communities then. Your business model is that you (and, ultimately, your corporate clients) pay a Guuru a few Francs, Euros, or Pounds for every satisfactory chat. Are there enough people that have the time and inspiration to chat and how do you make sure that they actually know what they’re talking about?
Building a Guuru community for a client never was a problem, even before Corona. This has to do with the motivation of people to help other clients, and because they care about a brand and their products. If you are fascinated by a given topic, be that mobile phones, hi-fi equipment or something else, you know much more about this than an average call center agent. To ensure that a community has these kinds of experts, we do online tests to certify them. These tests are not just about a product category, but also about processes that differ from one brand to another, for example questions regarding the terms of delivery. What we see is that different channels for the recruitment of Guurus vary by brand in their efficiency. Some are more successful in recruiting Guurus on Facebook, others via email.

GUURU has been a tool for tourism organizations as well, Switzerland Tourism for example has used your service to recruit specialists that answer questions in different languages like Dutch or Chinese. How hard has this business of yours been hit by Corona?
The chat traffic for tourism has declined massively. But it’s not just tourism, some other clients have significantly less traffic as well. Luckily for us as a startup, these verticals haven’t been our main revenue source.

A week in Corona time is a month of standard time, it seems. How fast can you help the clients that need your solution now?
With Coop Bau + Hobby, the DIY store department of one of Switzerland’s leading retailers, we were able to onboard the client with the necessary processes in about a week, and the recruitment and certification of their Guuru community took just about another week.

We don’t know when the corona crisis will be over. How big is the risk for you that everything returns to an old normal eventually, and that your offering will become less relevant?
We’ve seen a big change in behaviour right now, not just in the way we consume, but also in the way we work. And I think that some of this will not just revert, but endure. Working from home, for example, working at your own pace is a big opportunity for customer service. Right now it is about security and health reasons, but once the virus fades, people will appreciate the advantage of working at their own pace. As you mentioned before, Guurus don’t get paid for being present in an office, they get paid for solving a problem when it arrives. For our customers, the advantages of having a large, distributed on-call expert workforce becomes apparent right now, and I don’t think they’ll go back to the old model of having to pay office space and a workforce fit for average demand, but not for handling peaks like our model. The Guurus already like the possibility of working when it suits them, and not being bound to this old model.

What are your plans for this year in terms of development of your startup?
We continue to invest in growth and just signed a deal with a reseller partner in Italy. We will also add more Sales People in the UK and DACH reagion as soon as things with the pandemic go back to normal. In terms of platform development, we are about to release a brand new App for the Guurus and we are adding a lot of functionality to our self-learning chat bot. There is a lot going on currently and despite the economic downturn in the markets we are optimistic about coming the months.