Extend reposted this
My identity was stolen and this is what it taught me about B2B sales. 💀 No really, I did actually learn a lot about my product’s benefits through the experience. A month ago, some malicious wannabe HGTV star opened an Ashley Home Furniture credit card using my identity. Not only is that the lamest credit account to have in my name ever, but it also made it especially difficult to dispute. Courtesy of TD Bank’s (the card issuer) 2004 time capsule of a website and 5.5 hours of customer service holding time, I finally got the card disputed. I’ll know – by snail mail – “within 30 days” if my dispute holds water. The same timeframe from all 3 credit bureaus, and the FTC. After such a hellish experience, this whole operation is mission-critical on my priority list to get resolved ASAP – and now I’m in the dark for potentially a month to even hear an update. So what did this teach me about what I’m selling? – I’m not just complaining here. It taught me to see the direct customer-side effects of the problem that Extend, the YC backed, AI platform for processing unstructured data, is solving. One of the major reasons all of this takes so long can be directly tied to the variety and complexity of documents involved in this process. For each dispute (and mind you these are all a particular subset of a fraud case, there are so many different routes a dispute could be in regards to), I was encouraged to upload supporting documentation. FTC claims, police reports, maybe some receipts? PDF’s, images, physical mail. All being thrown at the problem. With no guidelines, let alone standardization, I, and anyone else affected, can toss in whatever we feel like that we believe will help the cause. There are no rules. No standards. Just a digital free-for-all. Until now, there were 2 ways this could be “handled” 1. On the other end of the screen, some poor soul has to sift through this mess, trying to make sense of it all. Manually classifying, filtering, and extracting data from the documents. To be faster, you throw more people at the problem. 2. Traditional automation tools? Useless. OCR? ML? Not a chance. They can handle a few of the most popular formats, but any new document they weren’t “trained” on and you’ve got yourself a need for human review. Now there’s a third way: 3. Built on the latest LLM’s, Extend enables teams to use NLP prompts to classify, extract, and validate any type of unstructured data, regardless of variety or format. Customers like Brex, Opendoor, Vendr, and others are driving faster customer processing times, and higher NPS, by automatically processing documents with Extend, even seeing a 75% reduction in manual tasks. P.S. Anyone got tips on how to avoid getting your identity jacked? Seriously, hit me up. This sucks. #documentautomation #B2Bsales #operationsmanagement #AI #techinnovation #AIinbusiness #businessSolutions