Bad IT is death by a thousand cuts. It leads to unhappy, unproductive employees. A company’s most valuable asset is its people – IT should enable employees to better focus on their jobs. Yet it is often overlooked and undervalued. Many organizations are understaffed or outsource it to an agency.
Fast growing teams are stuck in an impossible bind. Delivering high quality responses in-house requires increasingly expensive dedicated resources and technology. Automated solutions sacrifice customer experience under the guise of ‘fast ticket response times’ and rarely solve the real problem. Current IT outsourcing lacks human touch.
Fixify envisions the modern outsourced IT help desk as a potent vehicle for employee care. By leveraging a combination of operations science and natural language processing, Fixify makes IT workers more efficient so human experiences and care can scale. This means, crucially, keeping humans in the loop.
In a world of ‘automate everything,’ the Fixify thesis is more nuanced: let’s selectively automate the right backend operations for faster response, and place humans in the loop in the exact right areas where they are most needed. This creates an experience that feels ‘human all the way through’.
It is not the first time that Matt, Peter, and Mase are putting together product, operations, and AI to deliver a great user experience. The founders were execs and among the earliest employees at Expel, which built the leading Managed Detection and Response platform. They defied odds by achieving best-in-class SaaS margins with humans-in-the-loop at scale. Eventually, they realized the security and IT problem of managing response were, uncannily, similarly shaped problems.
This time around, advances in AI dramatically raised the potential ceiling to deliver a thoughtful and personalized care experience in IT.
What struck us was the clarity with which the Fixify team approached this new industry from first principles. Through careful customer discovery, their conclusions struck home with sophisticated IT buyers:
- UX is central to IT. Improving customer satisfaction and experience requires interfaces that feel friendly, warm and actually helpful.
- Dispatch methodology is key to a good first-contact experience. Specifically, targeting interaction and problem diagnosis can optimize resolution time.
- Scaling an IT helpdesk platform requires training models that automate the right actions, not all actions. Building a good evaluate/measure/improve loop means weighting it toward the right kinds of problems and resolutions. Not all of them are equal.
With the wider proliferation of AI across industries, this question is particularly stark: how can we build deeply technical software that preserves the human texture of experience? Fixify leverages AI to augment and even improve human empathy and care rather than replacing it with cold, unfeeling, robotic response. Deciding on what to automate and, perhaps just as importantly, what not to, requires both technical chops and product thoughtfulness.
Matt, Peter, and Mase make it their business to care about people. This doesn’t just apply to their customers, but to their team, their investors, and pretty much everyone in their lives.
Tackling the massive IT operations market is a daunting task, but if there is any team to do it – it’s this one. As the CTO Peter likes to say, “pressure is a privilege.”
Costanoa is thrilled to have invested in Fixify’s Seed Round and co-led its Series A round alongside Paladin and Decibel and support them in their journey toward building the next generation of IT.