As USAA developed its tools to better analyze the customer experience, the bank realized that it needed to update its digital replay capabilities to solve customer issues faster.
Enter Glassbox, a customer management company that allows a wide variety of firms to use data, analytics, session replays, app monitoring and machine learning to study the behavior of mobile and online customers.
Since 2010, the London firm has expanded globally and plans to use $25 million raised in Series B funding this week to improve its machine learning and automatic insights tools to serve customers like USAA, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Santander and Bank of America.
“The big key changes I see is the speed ... to changes getting made,” said Luke Horgan, USAA’s director of digital experience. “So it’s no longer we think something is happening, we wait a month to look at the data, and then we wait another month to see if the sales were actually impacted and then we debate about what to do about it. Now we can see what’s going on in the behavioral funnel, and we study individual examples.”
USAA is currently using Glassbox’s tools in its auto experience, where Horgan and his analysts plan to prove to the legal and information security side of the San Antonio bank that the product can be implemented at scale while also appropriately handling customers’ personally identifiable information.
Horgan likes the tech’s ability to identify trends about customers problems — not being able to navigate a part of the app, for example — and then also having the ability to zoom in on one customer to see what’s happening. “And we can do that in the same meeting,” he said.
Glassbox’s interface is also designed to be simple for the average USAA employee to use.
“I want it to be a tool on the front line,” Horgan said. “I like the idea of people answering all of their own level 1 and maybe even level 2 questions about what’s going on and what happened overnight.”
This round of financing was led by Updata Partners, a software-focused growth equity firm based in Washington, D.C., and by Ibex Investors, CEIIF (the venture arm of CreditEase) and Gefen Capital. This takes Glassbox’s total capital raise to $32.5 million.
Elan Zivotofsky, managing director and partner at Ibex, believes that Glassbox will continue to have a steady stream of large enterprise customers as expectations for the digital customer experience continue to rise.
“Customer interaction is moving from old school to digital customer interaction,” Zivotofsky said. “The question becomes how do we improve a desktop or mobile experience so that customer will be hungry to interact with my business even more?”
The company’s recurring software-as-a-service model is also popular within the software world. “It’s a model that customers like and where they are winning business consistently,” Zivotofsky said.
Glassbox decided to begin the fundraising round because of a greater demand for the business among new and existing customers. Its executives believe that serving a variety of industries will improve the development of the software.
“We just launched with a robo-adviser service and chose us to help them lead all the compliance elements of the digital proposition,” said Glassbox CEO Yaron Morganstern. “We have customers in the travel space that use us to increase conversion rate, and large banks that use us to record all of their customers’ online and mobile interactions.”
By capturing all of the interactions between a company and the end user, Morganstern aims to have Glassbox reduce friction between customers and help-desk employees as well as ease tension between large enterprises and their IT teams.
"Customers are not willing to speak to an agent because they have fear in the digital experience," Morganstern said. "While companies favor the digital experience," most of them "are saying that IT is a bottleneck while IT itself is frustrated that big business is not good at partnering or understanding complex IT issues."
