On Tuesday, October 19th, Vonage, a global leader in unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and intelligent contact center (ICC), announced the acquisition of Jumper.ai, a player in the omnichannel conversational commerce market for an undisclosed sum.
This blog reviews the deal and the rationale behind it.
Who is Jumper.ai?
Jumper.ai, founded in 2017 and based in Singapore, provides an end-to-end shopping engagement platform using AI-powered conversational commerce. Jumper.ai facilitates true omnichannel customer shopping experiences across social, messaging, and web applications and has built an impressive client list with names like BMW, Burger King, Disney, Jollibee, Samsung, Toyota, Unilever, Yves Saint Laurent, and more.
The acquisition of Jumper.ai expands Vonage’s AI footprint.
Jumper.ai maintains a detailed customer profile, persisting information on prior purchases and preferences to guide the customer through a personalized purchase journey from initial inquiry to final payment, all through their preferred channel of social communication.
Jumper.ai handles all aspects of the purchase journey beginning with social CRM and conversational ads to engage potential buyers, to automated bots to guide the buyer through their purchase journey, to order management, discounts, and loyalty programs to aid in customer retention.
The Growth of Conversational AI in the eCommerce market
Conversational AI has been expanding and maturing at an incredible rate over the last several years, and has infiltrated many verticals – from internal help desks to contact centers. The Aragon Research Globe™ for Conversational AI, 2021, published earlier this year, goes into detail on the explosive growth of this market. eCommerce has not been immune to this growth and conversational commerce is a natural offshoot of this technology as consumers are embracing the ability to search for and purchase items all from within the channel they use for all other aspects of their social media interactions.
Why did Vonage buy Jumper.ai?
Vonage integrated conversational AI into its contact center offering through its acquisition of Over.ai in 2019. The purchase of Jumper.ai expands Vonage’s AI footprint into the arena of conversational commerce, providing their clients with additional AI capabilities that will reduce friction and increase sales by allowing their clients’ customers to engage in buying journeys while never leaving their favorite social channel.
Additionally, Vonage will now be able to support a more natural conversational experience for many of their existing messaging and notification services as well as provide the ability for their clients to upsell within their contact center offering through a convenient conversational experience.
New Opportunities
The acquisition provides Vonage with the Jumper.ai technical team’s conversational commerce domain knowledge as well as their impressive customer base. This will allow Vonage to expand the footprint of their existing customer base to include conversational commerce and Jumper.ai’s customer base to include Vonage’s core product offerings. Additionally, Jumper.ai will be able to take advantage of Vonage’s APIs and integrations with applications, like Salesforce, to further enrich its offerings.
Bottom Line
The purchase of Jumper.ai expands Vonage’s AI footprint and broadens the tools and services they offer to their clients beyond the UC&C and ICC spaces. With the addition of Jumper.ai technologies, Vonage can offer their clients and partners a platform where their customers can engage with a convenient conversational experience throughout the entire product lifecycle, all within their preferred social media channel.