Helping businesses scale personalized customer service

You might recognize the co-founder and CTO of Clerk Chat from his credits on movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and Men in Black. You read that right. Clerk Chat’s origin story is a little different than most tech platforms. Igor Boshoer came from a background in film, where he did technical direction on movies like Star Wars: Episode VII. While he enjoyed using his technical skills to tell stories on the big screen, Boshoer was drawn to applying his technical prowess toward a new challenge: bringing humanity to business communication at scale. 

The vision for Clerk Chat was to make it possible to connect with each customer on a human level. And until now, this capability has been out of reach for most enterprises. Boshoer explains, “The idea is that you can go beyond a transactional 20% off coupon and ask real questions like “Are you sleeping well? If not, have you thought about these wellness gummies?”

Clerk Chat answers that challenge with scalable AI SMS, which uses Operator Connect and messaging powered by Bandwidth.

Charting a better way to communicate with flexible channels

Clerk Chat has built unique AI agents on its proprietary models with an important goal: allowing mom-and-pop shops to compete with big companies. “Think of a mom-and-pop cake shop. They can now have a marketing team, a sales team, and a support team. They can now compete.” said CEO Alexander Haque.

It’s not just about SMS; Clerk Chat knows consumers value communicating on their preferred channels. Businesses can plug into WhatsApp and use voice-enabled numbers for texting to make omnichannel a breeze.

Geyser-like growth through Operator Connect

Delivering on a vision to simplify communications for their SMB customers, Clerk Chat also integrates with providers like Microsoft to power Microsoft Teams texting. Partnering with Bandwidth made it easy to provide PSTN connectivity to Clerk Chat customers through the use of Operator Connect.

“We’re really proud to be one of Bandwidth’s first Operator Connect resellers” said Haque, explaining that it used to take several IT firms and IT managers to set up a complex Direct Routing system. Now, customers can get online in minutes or hours instead of days, weeks, or months. And there’s an extra layer of trust because, as Boshoer reports, “Bandwidth took a lot of the hard work. They built a lot of redundancy behind the scenes.”

“With Operator Connect through Clerk Chat, you’re able to get a phone number or activate your existing phone number all enabled within your Microsoft Teams admin portal literally within seconds.”

Igor Boshoer, Founder of Clerk Chat

Bandwidth’s certified SBCs and Microsoft SLAs made the Operator Connect choice a no-brainer which has paid off for Clerk Chat and its customers. In fact, it’s given Clerk Chat the chance to overcome barriers and open the gateway to move from onboarding hundreds of users at a time to around 40,000 in the last few months. “It’s been an absolute geyser,” reported Haque.

A daily surprise and delight

Haque talks about the fact that we’re all familiar with software companies that make big promises. But Bandwidth actually comes through, meaning Clerk Chat can deliver exceptional user experiences: “to their surprise and delight, [our customers] never knew going to Clerk Chat would make it possible to scale within a few clicks.”

For Clerk Chat, working with Bandwidth meant they’ve never been made to feel “too small” to be important. Bandwidth teams understand the unique challenges our customers are up against, so we focus on delivering improvements that will drive the most impact.

“It was amazing to see that a company the size of Bandwidth was able to meet us where we needed them to by offering a better program in our experience. Bandwidth was really impressive.”

Alexander Haque, CEO of Clerk Chat

A truly supportive global partnership

Clerk Chat lives and breathes the Silicon Valley ethos of constant testing and iteration. Likewise, Bandwidth has an emphasis on constant improvement and a willingness to partner closely with customers to bring new products to life. This continual building mode was very appealing to Haque and his team.

Bandwidth’s history of co-creation at the highest level was a determining factor in Haque’s choice: “If you just look at Bandwidth’s track record of partnerships first with Google, in the early 2000s and Microsoft in the mid-2010s… that level of partnership from a business side, but also from the technical side is what really gave us that reassurance and trust that Bandwidth was the partner that we wanted.”

“We’re dealing with communications—phone calls or text messaging—those are lifelines for our customers. And if those go down or there’s a problem, we need to be able to pick up the phone and have a representative on the phone within seconds. With other companies, that just wasn’t possible.”

Alexander Haque, CEO of Clerk Chat

And it wasn’t just Bandwidth’s reputation for successful products, but the day-to-day support customers know they can rely on. “It’s one of the only companies that we are able to just pick up the phone call and get an immediate response that even if the person wasn’t able to help us or assist us, they were incredible in trying to get us escalated to the right path and to solving the problem very quickly,” said Haque.

Focused on serving customers in more expansive ways, Clerk Chat also wanted the chance to scale beyond North America and was excited about Bandwidth’s presence in EMEA and beyond. “Being able to click in and enable North American numbers and then global numbers instantly was very attractive for us” said Haque. Bandwidth’s intuitive self-serve portal makes it simple for Haque’s team to order, provision, and manage phone numbers around the globe.

Creating for the future

“Anybody you talk to now will talk about artificial intelligence, and it elicits a lot of great product debates, philosophical debates, sociological debates” says Haque. “What excites us for the future is the birth of this technology being integrated across many other verticals. And it all starts with communication.” Haque went on to explain, “there’s a really natural intersection and we’re bringing scalable agents to life using SMS that’s powered by Bandwidth, the meta APIs on WhatsApp, and RCS.” 

Ultimately, all of this advancement serves Clerk Chat’s core customers, who are a mix of small business and enterprises. “The future is where a small business can actually communicate on a large scale and provide that human element to the customers,” Boshoer concluded.