SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gladly raises $50M, bringing its total raised to $118M, to further its mission of reinventing customer service. With Gladly, customers such as JetBlue, Godiva, and TUMI are transforming how they engage with their customers by putting the customer at the center of every conversation, and meeting them on the channels of their choice. In order to keep up with 21st-century consumers today, who are always on and live in a world of instant everything, Gladly is taking an innovative approach to helping companies exceed their customers’ expectations.

Gladly’s mission is to reinvent customer service by making it about people. And that mission is getting attention from some of the largest companies in the world. Gladly recently won the RTech CEO Forum Innovation Award, a program designed to connect retailers with companies enabling the future. CEOs of some of the world’s leading retailers, including Target, Ulta, and Home Depot selected Gladly for their innovative approach to customer service.

Gladly is rethinking customer service, centering it around the following core tenets:

• It’s about people and treating humans as humans, not case numbers
• A lifetime of conversations through seamless interactions between companies and their customers, that span across any channel
• Transform agents into heroes and make them naturally productive by arming them with all the context about their customer, instantly
• Superpower supervisors to enable them to run their contact center with all the visibility and metrics they need to drive efficiency

“We started Gladly with the goal of reinventing customer service; to put people back at the center of it all, and to enable companies to have empathetic, natural, productive conversations however their customers choose to engage,” Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly, explains. “We are honored to be helping amazing brands such as JetBlue, Godiva, and TUMI in their journeys towards delivering customer-centric service that drives revenue, lowers costs, and meets customers where they are.”

In today’s era of on-demand service and same-day delivery, companies today realize that the way forward to driving revenue and standing apart from their competitors lies in building enduring, long-lasting relationships with their customers. Gladly is changing the way customer service teams engage and communicate with their customers by helping companies like TUMI put the customer back at the center of service, with a platform that allows customers and customer service agents to communicate across any channel, seamlessly.

“A lot of retailers continue to throw up their hands asking the question ‘How do I compete with Amazon/ Alibaba/‘Insert large marketplace here’?’” says Charlie Cole, Chief Digital Officer at Tumi, and Global Chief eCommerce Officer at Samsonite. “We saw a simple opportunity–their business model is to sell everything seamlessly, offer great logistics, cross their fingers for 30 days that it isn’t returned, and then move onto the next transaction. But we sell durable goods that are meant to last a long time–which means we need to have a durable relationship with our clients meant to last a lifetime–Gladly allows companies to move beyond the 30-day transactional mindset and move towards a goal of true lasting relationships with their customers.”

Leading business to consumer (B2C) companies have seen the impact that Gladly has on customer service. Gladly customers are able to:

• Build relationships that drive revenue and repeat customers
• Exceed expectations of customers by meeting them where they are
• Better manage resources by improving efficiency and moving to modern messaging channels
• Deliver more personalized service that shows customers they know them

Gladly’s Series D investment brings the company’s total funding to $118 million. The additional investment reflects the increasing demand to bring the focus back on customers and the need for companies to have a more innovative alternative to the legacy, ticket and case-based technology that runs most of today’s customer service operations. Companies are realizing that they need to create an experience that enables them to build personal, VIP relationships that span across the lifetime of a customer across every conversation, no matter what channel. In addition to adding Future Fund and Glynn Capital as new investors, the investment also includes contributions from existing investors Greylock Partners, GGV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates. This select group of investors has extensive experience with disruptive companies and are no stranger to high growth, having backed companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Workday, AirBnB, Palo Alto Networks and more.

Why Gladly?

21st-century consumers are different. They range from 18 to 80 years old, they expect you to know them, and they communicate across a wide spread of channels—all the time.

But the legacy 20th-century customer service platforms that companies use today are all ticket and case-based systems, and were never built with the 21st-century consumer in mind. Instead, these platforms are centered around the idea that customer service is a workflow problem solved with case management.

But treating customers as cases and tickets doesn’t build the kind of relationships that last a lifetime. At Gladly, we’ve built a 21st-century platform that’s fit for the 21st-century consumer—one that puts people, and their conversations, at the heart of our platform. Because customers service is at its best when it’s a conversation.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform that enables B2C companies to focus on people talking to people throughout a lifetime of naturally productive conversations. With Gladly, customers are at the center and brands can communicate with their customers seamlessly across any channel from voice, email, messaging, chat, and social media. Agents are empowered, customers feel known, and companies build love and loyalty through consistently positive experiences. Headquartered in San Francisco, Gladly recently won the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA)’s award for Innovation and a Stevie Award for their work with JetBlue for Innovation in Customer Service.