Our Investment In Supportbench

A modern customer support system for B2B businesses

StandUp is thrilled to (finally!) announce our investment in Supportbench! Based in Vancouver, Supportbench provides a modern customer support platform for B2B businesses who — until now — have been stuck using tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk that are built for the B2C world.

StandUp is investing alongside a great syndicate of partners including N49P, Liquid2 Ventures and a number of operator-angels.

At StandUp, we love backing resourceful, scrappy, founders who have a deep understanding of the problem they solve and empathy for their customer. Supportbench founders Nooshin Alibhai and Eric Klimuk check all of these boxes and then some!

The business was born out of Eric’s own frustration as a veteran B2B support leader at Sophos and HP. At Sophos, Eric built a custom solution to address their own support needs. In doing so, he showed that with the right tools, support could drive customer value and switch from a cost centre, to a true source of profit for the organization.

Despite all of the innovations in chatbots and customer experience technology, there is significant whitespace in the B2B world, where customer support remains broken.

Customer support in B2B businesses is complex, requiring personalized responses, in-depth technical assistance, and significant back and forth communication. Customer contract values are high and mistakes can be very expensive. The proliferation of recurring revenue models (like SaaS) compounds this dynamic and highlights the importance of retention on company growth, making customer experience and support all the more critical.

The old solutions are not built for scaling B2B businesses. Most support tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk are made for B2C businesses. They emphasize “First In First Out” ticketing systems that cater to high volume, simple issues that can be dealt with through one-touch communication. Customers have a lower contract value and support is delivered by low-skilled frontline workers where mistakes are inexpensive. B2B businesses are forced to make do with these tools, or turn to the cumbersome and prohibitively expensive legacy systems like Oracle CX and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Supportbench bridges the gap between existing SMB and Enterprise customer service and ticketing products. It gives support teams a canvas to create and execute their vision of how best to support their customers. The tool is immensely customizable, integrates across systems to provide a complete picture of the customer, proactively predicts churn, and can scale with an organization. As one Supportbench customer put it “the tool has everything you could ever need to know about a customer in one place”.

We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Nooshin and Eric, as well as the type of company they are building. Nooshin is an ambitious, resourceful, and high integrity leader that exemplifies all the attributes StandUp looks for in the women founders we back.