Open source customer engagement platforms are making waves when it comes to communications today. More and more consumers are spending time online shopping, contacting businesses, and using technologies to get work done. The move to digital is officialy here - and it’s here to stay.
Customer engagement software plays a vital role in ensuring these communications continue seamlessly. The market is expected to continue moving forward in this space as demand increases.
Open source solutions which have the benefit of free, easy to use tools are one way to approach getting these solutions out to more businesses. However, with privacy concerns and regulations increasing - it’s not always easy for businesses like insurance and healthcare to adopt the offerings.
Now, a new open source customer engagement platform that’s being built by Chatwoot sets out to challenge all of these roadblocks with open source. The idea is to build a platform that challenges some of the biggest names in the space and offers an open source alternative to traditional, proprietary offerings.
VentureBeat’s Paul Sawers recently reported the company has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to work toward this new platform goal with funding coming from Goat Capital, Y Combinator (YC), Uncorrelated Ventures, Hack VC, and a host of angel investors, including Lambda School CEO Austen Allred.
One of the major goals in this move is to level the playing field for businesses of all sizes to utilize solutions they need to grow and maintain their business and do so without compromising data privacy - since the open source platform can be hosted on a company’s own infrastructure.
In addition, users gain access to a powerful shared inbox for communications channels, live chat tools, out of the box integrations and so much more. They can even build their own custom communications channel for customers using an API. With all of these options and other add on services available, Chatwoot will likely challenge players like Zendesk, Salesforce and others.