Meet Feedyou: The Conversational AI Platform to Build Better Relationships With Customers and Employees

Today we sat down with Vojtech, the CEO of Feedyou to talk more about what they do and his plans for the future.

Hi Vojtech, tell us a bit about your personal journey towards founding Feedyou.ai. How did you get here?

It’s been quite a ride! 🙂 My journey from college to now has been a rollercoaster of interesting mostly digital projects. The big break happened in 2014 when I was living and working in South East Asia. During that time, I had the privilege to work with great NGOs and organizations like WVI, WIF, the World Bank, UNDP, and even NASA. With NASA, we worked on a pretty wild project – automated planting mangrove trees in Myanmar (Burma) using special crafted drones and satellite navigation.

After that, there was a less glamorous episode, but definitely worth it at the end of the day – a startup that didn’t quite take off and had to be shut down after two years of chasing the money and finding ways to monetize it. But from the ashes of my very first startup company, we gave birth to Feedyou in December 2017. Feedyou started off by educating the market and our early customers to the world of virtual assistants (chatbots) for different HR process automation. Our story of becoming one of the leading Chat, Voice and Email AI automation platforms in the CE region started there.

Who is Feedyou.ai for and what problem are you solving?

Today companies of all sizes face several challenges due to the growing volume of communication across various channels (phone, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Viber, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workspace, Slack, SharePoint etc.). Customers and employees also require fast, always available and high-quality support. These facts create difficulties for contact center and internal helpdesk teams.

Moreover, many of us do monkey robot work all day round. UIPath finds that 67% of global office workers feel crushed by doing repetitive tasks (UIPath 2021 Office Worker Survey). Not to mention how difficult it is to find new employees (for various blue and white collar roles from call center agents to software engineers) and how expensive it is to onboard, train and motivate them. And the common result? According to NICE 2021, 42% is the minimal annual average call center agent attrition rate. So companies spend big money and lose valuable know-how at the some time while fighting with so called omnichannel communication and maintaining the best possible customer and employee experience, with resources that they have.

And that’s what Feedyou is for. Thanks to our Chat, Voice and Email AI, we ensure that the support teams are available 24/7, accessible from anywhere, in any language and cost-effective.

You are not the first startup to try solving this problem and there are already available proven solutions. Why should a company look at Feedyou.ai?

We’re definitely not the only company using Conversational and Generative AI to solve the problems mentioned above. However, we’re one of the few that managed to combine all key technologies into one single platform – which is easy to use for non-technical users, covering multiple languages (48+ languages available so far), supporting different chat, voice and email channels, open to various 3rd party integrations and with fast deployment within just weeks.

We’re obsessed with making virtual assistant solutions (chatbots, voicebots and mailbots) functional – solving specific business problems. In addition to our technology, our experienced team of Conversational Designers and Bot Developers is helping our customers to implement their first solutions before they take over the further maintenance and training. We have won several awards with our customers and their virtual assistant solutions, such as Microsoft Awards and Internet Effectiveness Awards. Even Gartner has recognized our platform as one of the best Conversation AI Platforms based on customer reviews.

How big is the team and why are they a good match for this project?

We have about 25 people, combining skills and experiences in product & engineering, sales & marketing and customer success / project delivery.

What do you think is the biggest problem right now in the LLMs market, and how does Feedyou.ai help solve that issue?

There are multiple problems related to the security, costs and limitations when it comes to the speed of conversation with an user or the volume of external data which you can proceed / “train” on a specific domain and customer context (the size of the source database).

We have again multiple ways how we can leverage Generative AI in our virtual assistant solutions – depending on the problem we want to solve:

• Text generation allowing us to save the result of any prompts to a variable. Great for personalized greetings, generating dialogs based on the context of a conversation or customer data, language detection, sentiment analysis etc.
• Using GenAI for NLP intent classifier – faster training of smaller language models – NLP model intent classification using just open text instead of examples.
• GPT-4 as a new NLP engine integrated into our Feedyou Platform – allowing us to train the NLP model with open text completely without intents / examples / dialogues. Great for small talks for example.

Let’s talk more about your products. What would you say distinguishes you from other virtual agents’ solutions? What is your “killer app”?

Chat, voice and email channel support followed by how easy it is to use the platform to build something functional quickly.

Can you tell us a bit more about how your technology really works? How unique is your solution?

We rely on a simple process:

• Build your virtual assistant once, deploy everywhere.
• Add any language on the way.
• Integrate any systems or data sources with easy if you need to.
• That’s basically it! 🙂

Our customers can design their solutions themselves, or we can help them out with it.

What have been your team’s biggest personal or professional challenges in making this project a reality?

When asked about the biggest challenges our team has faced in bringing this project to fruition, I’d highlight a few critical areas. First and foremost, finding the product-market fit was a significant hurdle. We needed to ensure that our product not only met market demands but also stood out among competitors.

Securing our initial customer base was another crucial step. We worked tirelessly to build trust and demonstrate the unique value of our product to those first few customers who took a chance on us.

Building our indirect sales channels also proved to be a substantial challenge, especially when it came to acquiring big enterprise customers. It required a strategic approach and a deep understanding of the market to establish and maintain these channels effectively.

In summary, these challenges were integral in shaping our journey and have played a pivotal role in our project’s overall success.

Who is the ideal customer for Feedyou.ai? What do people need to get started with Feedyou.ai?

We usually talk with C-level executives and the Head of Call Centre / Sales / Marketing or HR Department. The best customer profile is a company with a high volume of conversations with their customers and employees (a good return on investment is from 2-3 000 communications / requests per month). For internal processes automation is great if a company has 500+ employees.
We are strong in these industries – banking & insurance sector, telco & utility, ecommerce & retail, automotive and we have recently had our first successes in the healthcare sector too. Some of our clients include SKODA AUTO, Toyota Central Europe, MONETA Money Bank, Dr. Max, Sportisimo, PPL, Gi Group and many many more.”

How many clients do you have today and in which countries are you seeing the biggest interest?

We have been working with around 85 customers on over 250 projects. Currently, the greatest potential lies in automating both incoming and outgoing voice communications. Our primary focus is on the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, encompassing countries such as Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. Additionally, through our strong network of partners, we are able to extend our reach to other regions.

What do you hope that Feedyou.ai will be able to do for its users in the next few years that they can’t do now?

We aim to achieve a level of efficiency where we can design, train, and deploy solutions live within just a minute. Currently, we’ve managed to get everything up and running in a matter of a few weeks, which is a great achievement, but it still doesn’t quite align with the ambitious vision we have for our future. Additionally, we are looking to expand our reach beyond large and enterprise customers, hoping to make our technology accessible and beneficial for the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector as well.