While a company is building a path toward its next big product, an employee somewhere could be typing a problematic email that throws up a nasty roadblock.
In most cases, these types of communication slip ups, whether intentional or not, are discovered after the damage has already been done -- the proverbial 'putting the toothpaste back in the tube' problem.
That's where Austin risk management software startup LitLingo believes it can play a major role. Using AI and a rules-based approach, LitLingo encodes company policies into its monitoring software to proactively alert employees and managers when communications are being crafted in a potentially damaging way.
“The cost of acquiring new customers is so much higher than retaining existing customers," co-founder and CEO Kevin Brinig told Inno. "So if you can use AI to make sure that the communication to a customer matches the sentiment of the inbound email or addresses every single one of the problems that was brought up in an inbound email. Those kinds of subtleties are super important and super valuable.”
Brinig co-founded LitLingo last year with Todd Sifleet. The two met while working at Uber together -- they also lived near each other in San Francisco and became friends outside work. They continued looking at advances in AI and thought about applications for it as workplace communication tools like Slack and Teams started booming.
With some family and friends in Texas, the co-founders decided to move to Austin and continue building LitLingo by leveraging AI to manage language and rules-based approaches to help analyze relationships between words and phrases in real-time.
In a sense, the co-founders said, it's like spell check except that it's analyzing ideas and meaning. That means it can flag an email that overpromises what can be delivered or ensure that an employee is responding to all of the issues identified in an inbound message.
“We see it as a tool in the tool chest," Brinig said. "There’s a lot of benefit to the end user in terms of avoiding a mistake, not having a repeat ticket. The benefit of that real-time training means you don’t have to sit in a training class two months from now. So those benefits are really kind of exciting for the end user.”
LitLingo now has five employees, and it recently announced a $2 million seed round led by Austin's LiveOak Venture Partners to expand its product and engineering teams as it enters its next phase. As part of the deal, LiveOak Founding Partner Krishna Srinivasan is joining the company's board.
As workplace communication software has grown amid the pandemic, so have programs that help monitor employee performance. But LitLingo's co-founders say they haven't seen any push back against their software.
“We really haven’t seen anything negative when it comes to the Big Brother concept," he said. "I think it’s an older, outmoded view of the world where a person is kind of looking at everything. A computer isn’t going to judge you. The negative consequences aren’t there. It’s just positive for us.”
Meanwhile, because nearly every business deals in digital communications, LitLingo sees a lot of opportunities across the customer service wing of almost any type of client. That can help reduce the need for training sessions, since users are getting real-time feedback based on new company policies, and help retain customers.
“Similar to a spell-checker, nobody is worried about the spell checker watching them," Sifleet said. "They see that immediate value and they see it as helping them. And that’s what we’re focused on – helping our users communicate more effectively.”
