An Israeli startup designed to help businesses improve customer service, all the while reducing support overhead, engaging more customers online, tracking customer behaviour and boosting sales, is gaining traction world-wide as its Toronto office continues to flourish. 

Eyal Goldfarb, 30, who, since 2014, has been the North American director of sales for Nanorep, an Israeli high-tech company that utilizes automatic intelligence to reduce the amount of resources required in answering commonly-asked questions, said what sets this company apart from others is its unique algorithm that helps customers get answers to their questions in an instant.

“Nanorep narrows down the search to typically a singular answer, or maybe two or three, depending on how specific your question is, or what is recorded in the knowledge base [of a website],” Goldfarb explained.

“The knowledge base is the back end of the system, where all the information is stored. Basically Nanorep is meant to narrow down your search, so you don’t have to scour the website, you don’t have to call an agent, you don’t have to send an email. It’s instant, it’s automated 24/7, and it could even be personalized.

“When you ask a question it might prompt you to log in, and if you log in, the system will recognize who you are. Let’s say you’re a customer with Rogers and you have to verify who you are, we can have a similar verification process through the widget, where, once we verify you, information can be provided that is relevant to your specific account. It doesn’t have to be a generic answer, it could be much more personalized.”

He said that unlike their competition, Nanorep’s system is able to analyze an entire phrase or question, accounting for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, synonyms, and different ways of asking the same question, rather than relying on a keyword-based search.

“With our competition, they are keyword-based and once its system recognizes a popular keyword, it will provide every article that contains that keyword, much like a Google search. As a customer who is not interested in doing research, who just wants the answer to a question, they don’t want to sift through all that information,” he said.

Goldfarb said most customers will check a website first to see if they can find the information independently. Contacting a customer service representative can be a hassle for the customer, and a drain on resources for the business.

Nanorep promises a 40 per cent reduction in contact centre call volume by deflecting low value, repetitive inquiries with its self-learning technology that automatically imports content from the website’s FAQ page, customer knowledge bases and other external sources.

 “Rather than having to scour the website for the answer to a question, like, ‘How much does a certain product cost? Does your company ship to a certain country?’ you can ask a direct question and get a direct answer without having to reach a customer service agent over the phone.” 

Goldfarb, who was born in Israel and moved to Toronto when he was five, explained how he came to lead the Canadian office of a young startup, which is quickly making a name for itself around the world.

“In 2012, I led a Birthright trip and decided to stay in Israel and… scour the job market,” he said, adding that he noticed there were many opportunities for fluent English speakers.

“Also, I’m fluent in Hebrew, so that helped, I’m sure, but [Nanorep] was looking for native English speakers to represent their company,” he said. 

“I had studied business. I worked in sales before, I had done some finance and trading, but I had never been in high tech. I started as a sales rep, and I was selling the product to different companies around the world.”

Nanorep, founded in 2007 by four co-founders, three of whom are in their 30s, received financial help from local Israeli investors and by 2009, its product was ready for the market.

After working in Israel for two years, Goldfarb relocated to build the company from Toronto. He said since he started in 2012, the company has doubled in size and has received more investment funding.

Today, Nanorep boasts clients including Ikea in Israel, Vodafone, which is based in the United Kingdom, and Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. 

“Mostly we work with small and medium-sized businesses but we’re trying to break in to the large enterprises. That’s the direction we’re heading in,” he said.