Thankful

Thankful was a customer service software company that built an AI layer on top of existing helpdesks to read, route and resolve customer inquiries across written channels including email, chat, social media, in-app messaging and text. Its platform was organized around three products: AI Agent, which worked inside a brand's helpdesk like a human agent to tag and resolve requests such as missing packages, returns, exchanges and order tracking; Agent Assist, which intelligently routed tickets and suggested replies and next steps for human agents; and Insight, an analytics product giving enterprise clients real-time statistics and a unified view of customer service metrics. Rather than functioning as a scripted chatbot, the system personalized interactions using signals such as a customer's tone, location, purchase history and prior service history.

The company positioned customer service as a revenue driver rather than a cost center, arguing that brands invest heavily in acquisition marketing but hand inquiries to service teams with no knowledge of the existing relationship. It marketed primarily to consumer and ecommerce brands, and management described plans to extend into finance, insurance and healthcare verticals. Thankful integrated with and partnered with helpdesk providers including Zendesk, Kustomer and Gladly.

In July 2023, Gladly acquired Thankful and used its generative AI and no-code automation technology as the foundation of Gladly Sidekick, a self-service AI platform that pairs with Gladly's agent-facing Hero product. Sidekick centers on a no-code authoring tool for building automated conversation threads covering common requests such as managing an order, processing a return or requesting an exchange, drawing conversational responses from the Gladly Answers knowledge base and priced per assisted conversation. Thankful's co-founders moved to Gladly, with CTO Evan Tann joining as a Software Engineer Fellow.

Founding story

Ted Mico and Evan Tann founded the company in 2018 in Venice, California, out of frustration as consumers with customer service experiences; neither began with a background on the business side of the industry. Mico cited market research describing customer service as a $350 billion market and consumers spending roughly 43 days of their lives dealing with support, framing the company's goal as returning that time to customers.

Business model

B2B SaaS sold to brands as an application layer on top of their existing helpdesk software.

Thankful charged customers based on the volume of tickets handled and which of its products were used. Under Gladly, the derived Sidekick product moved to consumption-based pricing tied to the number of assisted conversations, alongside seat-based pricing for the agent-facing Hero product.

Traction

By September 2021 Thankful reported 400% year-over-year growth, more than 50 brand customers, and more than 30 million customer service tickets processed and learned from. The company cited Agent Assist making human agents up to 40% more efficient and AI Agent resolving up to 50% of queries. Named customers included Crate & Barrel, FabFitFun, MeUndies and UntuckIt; shared customers with Gladly included Bombas, Breeze Airways, Crate & Barrel, JOANN and MaryRuth Organics.

Latest developments

Following the July 2023 acquisition, Thankful's capabilities were transferred into Gladly Sidekick and the company was described as part of Gladly. Gladly (gladly.ai) now markets an agentic commerce and AI customer experience platform combining conversational commerce, lifelong customer memory, voice AI and agent-facing tooling, citing customer outcomes such as +19% conversion, +$34 average order value, 41% carts saved and results at MaryRuth's, Rothy's, KÜHL, Condé Nast and Deckers Brands.