Cohere is an AI-enabled customer experience platform.
Tell Me More
Cohere helps turn CX teams into active drivers of a company’s success by arming front line workers with advanced tools to solve inquiries and retain customers. Cohere transforms any CX professional into a high-performer, regardless of previous training or product knowledge. The product goes beyond chatbots and works as an orchestration layer across a company’s entire CX lifecycle to automate repetitive tasks, intelligently route problems to the right agents, and accelerate the customer support process.
From a self-service perspective, Cohere leverages text-based classification models to help surface the most relevant answers for repetitive FAQs. If a problem escalates and requires a live conversation, Cohere will intelligently route the problem to the team member with the best subject matter expertise on the topic. Additionally, the product will allow CX teams and customers to immediately screen share to resolve problems, all without exposing sensitive or private information.
With Cohere, CX teams can say goodbye to the countless calendar invites, Zoom links, and asking, “can you see my screen?”
Market Opportunity
As we talked about in Call Centers? Yawn, a deep dive on ASAPP, the market for enterprise-grade contact centers is large and growing quickly.
“Contact centers are everywhere. Whether it be a bank, airline, or insurance provider, there are real humans waiting on the other end of the phone, chat, or email to field your problem. In fact, Grandview Research expects the global contact center market to reach $24B, growing at 23% CAGR.”
However, Cohere is targeting a different end up the CX market. Cohere’s product is oriented around helping digital product companies provide great customer experiences to their end users. The ideal customer profile for an enterprise-grade contact center automation company like ASAPP is a multinational enterprise fielding millions of customer inquiries per year, equating to multi-year, six to eight figure average contracts (e.g., airlines, Telecommunications providers, etc.). Cohere, on the other hand, is targeting smaller, digital-first product companies. These are startups, SMBs, and enterprise companies whose digital products are sophisticated and are looking for ways to efficiently onboard and retain as many customers as possible.
Cohere is positioned as a CX tool for product companies, which is very different than ASAPP’s contact center automation platform. Rather than helping customers purchase an airplane ticket to Las Vegas for a friend’s bachelorette party, Cohere helps customers with digital products diagnose and resolve problems, like, “how do I export this data to Salesforce?”
Additionally, Cohere’s average contract values are likely nowhere near that of ASAPP’s. I suspect that Cohere will continue to build functionality that will allow it to one day compete with ASAPP in enterprise-grade contact center automation, but for now, Cohere is playing in a league of its own.
Why I like the company
Cohere’s product is my quintessential definition for New-age SaaS. The company allows customers to leverage data to provide strong, collaborative user experiences and create measurable ROI for end-users. The company’s variable customer engagement channels could prove to be a differentiator for companies that want to service their customers in the most user-friendly way. Similarly, Cohere’s Cobrowse feature signals that the team is thinking about customer engagement channels differently than CX companies of the past. This consumerization of the enterprise could only be brought to market with inspiration from mission-critical remote working tools like Zoom, Loom, Slack, and more.
From a go-to-market perspective, I believe that Cohere’s initial customer segmentation is validated through its product-led growth sales motion. This PLG motion will allow the company to grow in lockstep with their customers — as their customers scale, so will Cohere’s product functionality, and hopefully, contract values. Over time, Cohere will layer in a more traditional “top-down” sales team that will target commercial accounts for larger contract values until one day competing with enterprise contact center automation vendors like ASAPP.
Lastly, it’s still early and the team has done a wonderful job bringing a net-new product to market. For a small team, Cohere already has hundreds of paying customers. In the long run, it’s very possible that one of these early customers scales their usage to represent 5, 10, or 20% of Cohere’s total ARR. For now, Cohere represents an exciting early-stage company to join.
