The Chilean user experience firm is looking to expand into the North American market and, to that end, has gone out to seduce investors. The CX sector is well worth it, with an expected growth of 15% annually, driven by technologies such as AI.
Only six years have passed since Chileans Julio Farías and Mario Bustos left their positions in important multinationals to start their own venture related to the area of consumer experience.
What began as the adventure of two former Oracles in May 2017 in a cowork, has extended nowadays to hundreds of collaborators present in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Spain and Chile. Now they have also arrived to the United States after opening an office in San Francisco in alliance with Zendesk, the Californian company specializing in CX, the initials by which the customer experience sector is called.
When Zerviz set its path as technological aggregators, the “customer experience” was not so well defined or established in the market, but there its founders saw an opportunity to do business. They began by implementing software that could serve customers from several channels; they quickly understood that the challenges in service and customer service that they saw in Chile were similar to other countries; and they decided to start contacting other companies in the region.
With the route already laid out, they became a firm specialized in CX, implementing various digital solutions to improve the performance of companies with clients throughout Latin America. They now serve companies in multiple industries in 16 countries, above all with the need to improve customer experience with the help of technology.
“We started with our own capital and the way to grow has always been to reinvest the company's revenue, until today. But recently companies and investment funds from different parts of the world have asked us about buying part or 100% of the company. American, Canadian and Mexican funds. We talked about it, and finally we said, why not?” Julio Farías, Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of Zerviz, explains to AméricaEconomía.
And, having made the decision to continue growing, the firm's projections are encouraging.
“The horizon for growth is to directly double our turnover, which in 2023 reached US$ 8 million. Looking at 2024, we plan to close with about US$ 13 million and continue growing to US$ 27 million, which is the goal. The North American market is a super interesting market for us. We have been investing a lot and we also have talent and clients from the United States who support us,” declares the CCO.
CX FEVER
AI and the cloud have been accelerators of digitalization throughout the American continent. And along that path, technology aggregators are growing by double digits.
But so does the CX market, and, hence, Zerviz's cheerful accounts.
“Between billing growth, new clients, the arrival in the North American market, and the openness to talking with these North American, Canadian, and Mexican funds, we see the injection of external capital as a real possibility,” comments Farías.
Why is the sector attractive?
Because after years of delaying user experience initiatives, companies are already making large investments in the subsector. So much so, that the expectation of global investments in CX was estimated at US$641 billion in 2022, with an annual growth of 15% until 2028, according to the consulting firm Quadient.
Consulting firm Mordor Intelligence, meanwhile, indicates that the customer experience management market will grow, driven by greater digitalization, advances in cloud and AI solutions, and the unification of multichannel touchpoints in 2024-2029 and that Brands are leveraging these tools for customer management and alignment with their offerings.
At the Latin American level, different countries show a varied spectrum in terms of CX maturity.
“While some leading companies have embraced advanced strategies, others are still in the initial phases of understanding and implementation. This mixed scenario reflects a crucial opportunity: to learn, adapt and apply global CX practices, while respecting regional particularities,” says Alfredo Matamala Inzunza, Customer Experience consultant.
In any case, the challenge today lies in integrating and transferring this quality of service to the digital sphere, maintaining the warmth and personalization that characterizes the region, because customer loyalty is lost much easier than it is gained. According to PwC, one in three customers will abandon a brand after just one bad experience.
“The market aimed at customer experience has a lot of projection in the coming years. Much of what is customer experience is also linked to the world of artificial intelligence. In that segment we are bringing new offers and we are also working in the cloud world and in the staffing sector, or talent as a service. So, this also allows us to project much greater growth than we had projected here in the region,” asserts the founder.
The Zerviz trust has its fair share of benchmarking. They have studied other companies that do something similar within the US market and their annual turnover.
“We believe that we are on the right path and that growth is occurring due to different factors. Not only because of what we have been doing, but also because of what the market is demanding: optimization, improvement of the experience, increase in sales, greater number of clients and efficiency in the operation,” he comments.
AMERICAN LEARNING
Since Zerviz began operations in the United States last year, they have been able to take the pulse of the market.
“We have been recognized by customers and our partners. This makes us think that we are on the right path,” recalls Farías.
Their optimism has a basis, as they began to obtain clients in the northern country almost a month after landing. And they are already diversifying the offer they started with in California.
“I'm not telling you that the North American market suffers from the services or experience that we have, but there are few companies dedicated to customer experience. I think that is our great differential,” emphasizes Farías.
In fact, an important part of this firm's strategy is to land with the customer experience vertical and then begin to show the rest of the systems that can provide a client: the cloud, staffing augmentation and other technological aggregations.
Zerviz started with Five9, the contact center with which they landed in the United States, but the COO says they can offer projects of different sizes to clients in the CX world.
“We can offer virtual assistants, digital marketing, marketing automation, experience measurement. And on the talent as a service side we are seeing a lot of staffing. We are also seeing a lot with Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud migration projects. “We are one of the few AWS partners specializing in Amazon Connect for Latin America,” details the founder.
Regarding the future of CX itself, from the point of view of the experience that companies are providing to their customers, Farías comments that instant personalization or hyper-personalization is coming.
“Each person is a universe in themselves and what we seek is to provide them with an ad hoc experience, where the client says: 'I feel like they are talking to me, that they care about me, that the company knows me.' Therefore, I have loyalty with them,'” Farías proposes.
