All companies dealing with clients and orders are engaged in operational work 😉 The more orders there are, the more unexpected situations arise that need to be noticed and resolved quickly. And companies are genuinely willing to pay for help in this. The potential market is simply enormous. And one can enter it effectively right now by merging these two platforms.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
Every decent company already has dashboards that display real-time indicators of its operational activities. However, those responsible for operations need to constantly check these dashboards to detect anomalies and take appropriate action.
Flawless is a platform that allows operations staff to stop constantly monitoring dashboards and start responding to issues as they arise. That’s because Flawless automatically tracks unusual changes in indicators and notifies specific people responsible for those areas.
The platform’s first customers are online stores, food delivery services and marketplaces that need to ensure the fast and seamless execution of a large number of real-time orders.
By implementing Flawless, employees at these companies saved 20% of their time on manual and repetitive tasks. As a result, they were able to process a greater volume of orders with fewer operational staff.
Their response time to problems decreased tenfold. This has significantly reduced the number of negative responses from customers facing problems, allowing the companies to retain most of them.
The first step is to integrate Flawless with all sources of operational activity information. The platform comes with over 300 out-of-the-box modules for integration with popular enterprise systems. For bespoke enterprise systems, the platform can be integrated via an API.
The information from these sources then needs to be aggregated into charts or tables on the platform’s dashboard to highlight anomalies. For example, you could create a table showing incoming orders and another showing the time taken for each order, and so on.
Each table or chart requires a set of rules that Flawless uses to determine if everything is operating as usual or if there are exceptions. The ruleset can be immediately debugged – by clicking a button and observing which table rows or chart sections are highlighted as anomalies.
Every rule created now requires a list of recipients who will receive notifications about the respective anomaly. Users can specify where these notifications will be sent – be it email, messenger, SMS, etc. For integration with popular communication channels, the platform offers 30 ready-to-use modules.
For every anomaly, you can even add a predefined step-by-step resolution scenario in the form of a checklist. This ensures that the recipient of the notification knows exactly what steps to take, reducing response time and ensuring nothing is overlooked. A link to this scenario is sent to the responsible employee alongside the problem notification.
The platform also tracks the completion of these scenarios (ticking off relevant checkboxes). This allows for monitoring the speed and completeness of an employee’s response to issues.
Operational managers can access this information in a dedicated section of the platform. This way, they can monitor the productivity of individual employees and the speed at which problems of each type are resolved. This helps in either reprimanding or praising the employees, or even in refining the problem-solving scenarios themselves.
Operational managers can integrate new data sources for which ready-made integration modules exist. They can add new tables and charts to the dashboards, modify the set and composition of rules, and create/edit reaction scenarios for anomalies using a simple editor. They don’t need to turn to developers every time, empowering them to swiftly and simply structure and improve business processes they fully control.
The cost of standard tariffs for using the platform is $199 per month for 1 data source, 10 monitoring rules, and 10 users or $699 per month for 3 data sources, 50 monitoring rules, and 30 users. For prices on more potent configurations, one must contact the startup directly.
Flawless was launched last year. It secured its first investment round of $1 million in February. Now, just seven months later, it has attracted new investments totaling $2.2 million.
What’s intriguing about this is the pace at which Flawless has managed to gain traction and secure funding. It highlights the pressing need in the market for operational efficiency tools. The idea of automating anomaly detection and providing actionable steps for resolution is both novel and timely. As businesses grow and operations become more complex, tools like Flawless can become indispensable in ensuring smooth, efficient, and error-free operations.
The Main Differentiator and the Future of Problem-solving Platforms
Flawless prides itself on its distinction from the plethora of business analytics systems available in the market. Their standout feature? The platform’s ability not just to present the current situation but also to aptly react to issues. This transition propels Flawless from the realm of “business analytics platforms” to the novel category of “problem-solving platforms” or incident management.
Conceptually, this reminded me of the startup Octo. Octo developed an AI-assistant manifested as a chatbot that autonomously addresses queries directed at customer support services.
While chatbots are now dime a dozen, the uniqueness of Octo lies in its ability not just to respond to user queries but to actively solve their issues. Addressing a problem is more than merely answering questions; it necessitates actions.
For instance, if a customer inquires about their order’s whereabouts, the AI assistant should be capable of contacting the delivery service handling the order, determining the issue, estimating its resolution time, and relaying this information to the customer. If the customer is unsatisfied and opts to cancel the order, the AI would then need to delve into the order database, amend the order’s status, liaise with the delivery service to return the product, and potentially even access the accounting system to initiate a refund.
Equipped for such tasks, Octo’s AI assistant can independently address 72% of queries directed at customer service, in stark contrast to the 14% managed by typical query-responding chatbots.
Therefore, Octo’s AI assistant has also transitioned from the “AI query-responder” category to the “AI problem-solver” bracket, marking a transformative level of customer support automation.
WHERE TO RUN
Examining Flawless and Octo separately, there’s an immediate urge to amalgamate their functionalities to forge a more potent problem-solving tool.
Firstly, post Flawless dashboard data source integration and the creation of requisite operational metric tables and charts, an AI module can be unleashed. This module could autonomously identify “unusual” table rows and chart segments, likely indicative of anomalies. This AI-driven approach would negate the need for manually setting anomaly detection rules and allow for their dynamic adjustment.
Secondly, Flawless directs anomaly notifications to real people, who must manually address the situation. However, the platform’s capability to associate standard problem-solving scenarios with anomalies hints at potential AI intervention, similar to Octo’s functionality.
Fundamentally, customer support queries are anomalies flagged by clients. Thus, the problem-solving methodology should largely remain consistent.
Every company with customers and orders engages in operational work. Hence, the potential market for operational problem-solving platforms is vast. The trajectory is clear: the development of platforms dedicated to automating operational problem resolution.
Incorporating AI into these platforms, even at a basic level as outlined above, will make them significantly more potent, saving companies more time and money. Consequently, businesses would willingly invest more in such platforms, elevating their relevance and immediacy. This is a golden opportunity awaiting exploitation.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Flawless
Website: flawless.so
Latest Funding Round: $2.2M, 28.09.2023
Total Investments: $3.2M, Funding Rounds: 2