Back in 2012 I received an angry call from a woman holding me personally responsible for not being able to source Christmas Nougat Pudding for her elderly mother. It was 2012 and the new owners of Darrell Lea had decided to close the bricks-and-mortar stores across the country.
I was working the customer support desk at the confectioners’ Kogarah office, and this was one of many rage-filled phone calls ‘d received that day alone.
“Christmas was ruined.”
“My father has been eating these since 1953.”
“How are you going to fix this?”
It was quite the conundrum. Most days I enjoyed solving problems for people. However, hundreds of retail workers had just lost their jobs right before Christmas. So had I.
And here were these people whinging about the availability of a, frankly, mediocre dessert. The coconut roughs were always better, sorry.
I was usually good at my job. I could defuse the angriest of customers with a sympathetic ear, wisely timed joke or conspiratorial tone indicating I’d bend a non-existent rule to help them out.
But that day I didn’t care. It really didn’t seem like a priority to me when so many people may not be even able to pay the bills come December.
Frustrations were running high, an achingly common thing when it comes to customer support. And this can lead to a lot of things: yelling, angry walls of text, forgetting that people on both ends are actually human.
Most of all, it leads to miscommunication. In turn, resolution times get blown out because the facts are buried by emotion. Sometimes on both ends.
No one has really solved this issue at scale yet. But a small Sydney startup is having a crack at it.
Ajust is an AI-powered tech platform that wants to change how customer complaints are handled … for every company.
While most customer service tools are aimed at being utilised in-house, Ajust wants to be consumer-facing. It is offering to be the conduit between businesses and your mum during her most terrifying rage blackouts when her internet goes down.
“We’ve inverted customer service,” Tom Kaldor, founder of Ajust, told SmartCompany on a call.
Kaldor is a lawyer who previously worked in competition and consumer law at Allens. He was also the head of product during the early years of law startup LegalVision.
“Does it make sense for every business to have their own customised Zendesk they have to navigate? Or does it make sense for every consumer to use the same intake process for all businesses, and then businesses to resolve it in a way that makes sense for them?” he asks.
And that’s exactly what Ajust does.
Consumers who have a complaint about a company can use the Ajust platform for free. It then uses AI to go through the complaint, as well as the specific complaints process for that particular company, to send through streamlined communication between the two parties to get the problem solved faster.
“When we send the complaint from our platform, it’ll go as the email to the business. The direction there is, ‘here’s the complaint, you need to respond to the consumer on these contact details to solve it’,” explains Kaldor.
According to Kaldor, Ajust maintains visibility by staying engaged with the consumer.
“Probably 60-70% of consumers keep us updated on what’s happened… It’s genuinely a novel new approach that we’re excited about.”
The company only launched in 2022 and it has already hit some decent milestones. Kaldor was a solo founder, but by the end of last year he had raised $700,000 in pre-seed funding, led by Carthona Capital.
Since then, he has added three to the headcount and the company was part of AWS’s ANZ Generative AI Accelerator, which wrapped up in August.
While Ajust’s website says it resolves complaints levelled against airlines, telcos, energy providers and banks, it will actually go into bat with any company.
While it’s still early days, Ajust has resolved complaints for consumers with more than 100 different businesses. According to the company, consumers who use its service receive $100-$200 in refunds or compensation on average.
And it seems like the businesses themselves are winning out too.
Kaldor told SmartCompany that when a consumer uses their platform, their net promoter score (NPS) for the business is bumped four to five points on average.
This score rates the likelihood that a consumer would recommend a company, so for that to go up after lodging a complaint is a net positive for a business.
“We really lean into this idea that if you put the customer first and do what’s good for them, you ultimately will drive business value,” Kaldor says.
“A customer who’s raised a complaint with you is ultimately saying, ‘Hey, something about your product or service has fallen short. I’ve had a bad experience, but I’m taking the time to raise that with you and that means that I’m primed for being impressed with how you approach it from here’.
“Our worldview is there’s always going to be mistakes, there’s always going to be bad experiences, there’s always going to be complaints. What matters is how you show up for your customers after that point.”
As a tech journalist with a strong customer service background, my biggest question was around data privacy — from a couple of different perspectives.
Of course there is the question that needs to be asked about what Ajust does with the consumer data it collects.
But I was also curious about how this might also be a barrier to entry. After all, banks and telcos in particular should be vigilant when it comes to customer complaints and queries, especially with the rise of data breaches and phishing schemes.
Surely that makes Ajust’s job harder?
“That’s a good question. There hasn’t been a lot of that, even though we’re being clear that we’re not a representative [of the customer],” Kaldor says.
“I wouldn’t say they’re laissez-faire about customer privacy, but we get responses like, ‘thanks, team. We’ll get onto this for the consumer’. We’re treated almost like an outsourced part of their customer service system, which is what we want.”
It probably helps that all of the information Ajust has is top line and sent to them by the consumers themselves.
“We obviously have terms of use and a privacy policy that consumers have to be comfortable with when they start the process. And we need to be able to share that core complaint data with the business involved to be able to send it on and and resolve it,” Kaldor says.
“We don’t do anything else with that data in a personalised way. We’re not selling personal data or anything like that. And we use best practice AWS stack — we keep the personal information in one database that’s separate from the non-personal information.”
Of course, for Ajust to become a household name it needs to be on the radars of businesses as well consumers. And it’s been having a bit of fun getting noticed.
Last week Kaldor took to LinkedIn to offer Qantas help with the slew of complaints its racked up over the past few months. Cancelled flights, selling tickets to canned flights, lost and damaged baggage — Qantas complaints have been on the rise , and the ACCC’s Airline Competition report from June has the data to prove it.
“Some quick facts: >50% of people we spoke to said it was too much effort to make an airline complaint, >25% had made a complaint, but were still waiting for a resolution, 1000s of web searches for “Qantas complaints” each month,” Kaldor said in the post.
He went onto explain how Ajust can help before tagging a laundry list of Australian banks and telcos that tend to get a large amount of complaints — some of which Ajust has already helped consumers resolve issues with.
“We’re not here to criticise, we’re here to lend a hand. So what do you think Vanessa Hudson, will you accept our offer?”
The post got some good engagement, and the timing couldn’t be better as Ajust aims to close the gap between itself and the businesses it is looking to service.
“If consumers have a painful experience trying to raise one customer complaint, perhaps the only person that has a more painful experience is that customer service rep that sits on the other side of 80 of those complaints every day,” Kaldor says.
“We’re about to launch in October the MVP of what we’re offering businesses, which has been basically designed to make their lives better.”
This tool will be a copilot and coach for customer service teams designed to help resolve issues easier. This will include suggested task lists and responses.
“Because we take all the information really well, we’re able to say, ‘Hey, this complaint came from Tom, this is what he said he wants, here’s a really easy way to solve it and here’s a draft email for you to send,” Kaldor explains.
Further details are currently light, but there will most likely be a freemium version as well as a paid one for businesses and industries that have more specific needs.
“Qantas specifically might also need to know if they’re a frequent flyer. That’s a new data requirement, which doesn’t change the customers UX, it just changes what we look for using the AI, and the experience that we offer,” Kaldor adds.
“But then on top of that, if businesses have existing templates or guidelines for their customer service team, we can ingest those and then they will make the responses of our AI tool more specific and tailored to that business.”
While Ajust’s business is based upon the sheer number of complaints businesses receive, Kaldor maintains the startup is not there to have a dig.
Instead, the idea is that the customer service experience can be improved for both a consumer and the business with someone like them to help translate and actually get to the issue.
“We get a handful of Telstra complaints come through our platform every day and they deal with them really well,” Kaldor says.
“Often it’s people who are like, ‘I tried to solve this directly with Telstra, but for whatever reason it hasn’t been’, and then we give Telstra the right info to get itself and it gets solved.”
Deputy editor
A multi-award-winning journalist, Tegan has been reporting on technology, telecommunications and gaming for the past 10 years. She regularly appears on mainstream media channels as an expert tech commentator. Her previous roles include editor of Gizmodo Australia and global reviews editor at Finder. She has also served as a reporter and editor across Business Insider, Lifehacker and Kotaku Australia. Tegan is also the co-host of one of the top technology podcasts in Australia, Weird Tech. You can find her on Twitter @Tegan_Writes.
