Klearcom is a LEO triumph as it targets global clients
The firm counts Chemtrec, Mastercard and Pfizer, among its growing customer base, but the Waterford based company is not forgetting its LEO support
With big ambitions and support from the Local Enterprise Office (LEO), in Waterford, Liam Dunne, has grown his company Klearcom, into a global business.
Top clients include Pfizer, Mastercard, and Chemtrec, a leading provider of emergency response information for hazardous materials, who use Klearcom’s AI based technology, which operates across 96 different countries. Dunne said the company helps multinationals quickly address any glitches in their customer call services.
“When you phone into a call centre, and you hear a welcome message, that’s an IVR, which stands for Interactive Voice Response, which stewards your call. That is generative AI, and it’s supposed to help understand your problem so it can direct you to the right source to resolve it,” said Liam Dunne, co-founder and CEO of Klearcom.
“But let’s say you’re a Mastercard user, and you have travelled abroad and are checking in at a hotel, but when you swipe your credit card, there’s an issue with the card. What you would do is ring a number on the card and try to get through to a voice bot or human agent, and if you’ve issues getting through, the multinationals will have no clue that those problems are present.
“What we’ve built is a platform that basically tests and validates that speech based IVR’s or voice bots are working for multinational call centres. If you take the Mastercard or Pfizer, these companies have call centres all across the globe and if there’s any issues, it’s our apps, our piece of software that tells them that something is wrong, like if an ‘Option five’ in Ireland is no longer accepting credit cards or if in and you call Pfizer and say a key word for a drug but the intent is not being interrupted, it means there is an issue with customers getting through.
“And it all comes down to this ‘switching economy’. The reason our customers pay for this is according to Accenture, the switching economy is worth €6.6 trillion annually, and today customers don’t complain, they just switch when there’s poor service. So, 83 per cent of people will avoid a company forever due to a poor IVR experience. We’re the guys who basically help avoid that from happening.”
Klearcom’s platform is AI based that automatically analyses a full customer call path, benchmarks that call performance, and alerts multinationals on any issue that is caught.
“We are proactively ensuring these multinationals have no hidden or unknown down time costs, so ultimately, they’re answering more calls, generating a greater revenue in service, and ensuring long term loyal customers in this switching economy,” added Dunne.
Any start up is tough, but the ambitions and targets we set ourselves, particularly during the pandemic were especially ambitious
Founded in 2018, it was Waterford’s LEO that helped Dunne and his peers get the start-up advice and support needed to achieve their ambitious goals.
“It’s more than the grants, it’s the advice, mentoring and support structure which gives you the confidence to achieve your goals. They also knew when it was the right time to scale up,” he said.
Dunne initially started looking for locations for his business in Dublin and Cork, but decided his native Waterford was the best place for the company to grow internationally. He contacted the LEO in 2019, and in 2020, received a Feasibility Study Grant to assist with the creation of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a product with just enough functions to adopt a customer base. This was followed by grants in priming and marketing in 2021.
From the outset, Klearcom was confident in what it had to offer – a revolutionary way to provide voice communication reliability which would prevent outages and resolve issues using AI and machine led technology.
For companies like Mastercard, this means issues or problems will be picked up and flagged by Klearcom’s software, allowing them to quickly address and fix any issue, and allow callers a quality customer experience and seamless interaction.
“Any start up is tough, but the ambitions and targets we set ourselves, particularly during the pandemic were especially ambitious,” said Dunne. “Waterford LEO was there for us at the start with the support and resources we needed.”
Most recently, Klearcom opened new offices in New York and India. Last year, Klearcom received €1.5 million in an investment funding round which allowed for those two new openings to happen.
Last November, the company was awarded ‘New business of the Year’ at the Waterford Chamber Awards and Emerging Company of the Year award at the Irish Technology Awards.
