Sidekick: The AI Support Bot for CX Teams

In today's fast-paced business world, customer experience (CX) is more important than ever. CX teams are tasked with providing excellent service while juggling multiple responsibilities. With the current economic downturn, companies are under pressure to cut costs and do more with less. This leaves CX teams struggling to balance providing technical support to customers and their more important long-term work.

Enter Sidekick, an open source platform that lets companies sync data from SaaS tools to vector databases. Founded in 2022 by Ayan Bandyopadhyay and Jason Fan, Sidekick is an AI support bot for CX teams. It uses GPT-powered applications to automate customer support tasks and free up CX teams to focus on more valuable work.

In this article, we will explore Sidekick and its features, the problem it solves, and why it is important for modern CX teams.

What is Sidekick?

Sidekick is an open source platform that lets companies sync data from SaaS tools to vector databases, which is necessary to build GPT-powered applications. This pipeline normally takes several weeks to set up and is expensive to maintain, but Sidekick handles it automatically through a dashboard and CLI.

Sidekick is also an open source AI support bot for CX teams. Companies like Airbyte use Sidekick to automatically answer customer questions based on their support documentation. Sidekick uses open source tools to fetch, index, and store documentation from a variety of sources and GPT to generate responses.

Who is behind Sidekick?

Sidekick was founded in 2022 by Ayan Bandyopadhyay and Jason Fan. Ayan Bandyopadhyay is a former software engineer at Robinhood and a graduate of Caltech's class of 2020. Jason Fan is a former product manager at Robinhood and a graduate of the University of Toronto.

Their mission is to handle the grunt work of providing technical support so CX teams can focus on what’s most valuable for their company. With Sidekick, CX teams can scale support with content, not headcount, and resolve issues instead of just deflecting them.

What problem does Sidekick solve?

The current state of chatbots leaves much to be desired. CX teams are overwhelmed, and traditional chatbots are designed to “deflect” customer issues, not resolve them. CX teams still need humans to provide support for technical issues, or risk angering customers and causing them to churn.

For dev tool companies, this is even worse because engineers are required to troubleshoot, and engineering time is expensive. Sidekick solves this problem by using open source tools to fetch, index, and store documentation from a variety of sources, and GPT to generate responses.

How does Sidekick work?

Sidekick uses open source tools to fetch, index, and store documentation from a variety of sources, and GPT to generate responses. Unlike competing products, Sidekick lets CX teams scale support with content, not headcount. It resolves issues instead of just deflecting them, and gets better over time as more content is created.

Airbyte uses Sidekick to provide instant, 24/7 answers to their open source community, cutting down on time spent providing technical support by over 40%. This allows Airbyte's CX team to focus on more valuable work and be recognized as the customer superheroes they are.
Why is Sidekick important?

Sidekick is important because it allows CX teams to focus on what’s most valuable for their company - improving customer satisfaction and driving revenue. By freeing up CX teams from handling the grunt work of providing technical support, Sidekick allows them to spend more time analyzing feedback, identifying at-risk customers, and upselling products, which are all critical tasks that can drive revenue and customer loyalty.

Moreover, Sidekick helps companies reduce their support costs by providing instant and accurate responses to customers 24/7, which can significantly reduce the number of tickets that require human intervention. This is particularly important for dev tool companies, where engineering time is expensive and every minute spent on technical support is a minute taken away from developing new features or improving existing ones.

Why choose Sidekick over other chatbots?

Sidekick is different from other chatbots because it resolves issues instead of just deflecting them. Traditional chatbots are designed to deflect customer issues, providing generic responses that often don't address the customer's specific problem. This can lead to frustration and can even cause customers to churn.

In contrast, Sidekick is designed to provide accurate and relevant responses to customer inquiries, reducing the need for human intervention and improving customer satisfaction. Moreover, Sidekick gets better over time as more content is added to the repository, allowing CX teams to continuously improve the accuracy and relevance of the chatbot's responses.

Finally, Sidekick is open source, which means that companies can use and modify the platform to suit their specific needs. This makes Sidekick a flexible and customizable solution that can be tailored to meet the unique requirements of different companies and industries.

Conclusion

Sidekick is an innovative and powerful tool that can help CX teams improve customer satisfaction and drive revenue by automating technical support tasks. By freeing up CX teams from the grunt work of providing technical support, Sidekick allows them to concentrate on more critical tasks that can help grow the business.

Moreover, Sidekick is different from other chatbots because it resolves issues instead of just deflecting them, providing accurate and relevant responses to customer inquiries. This can significantly reduce support costs and improve response times, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Finally, Sidekick is open source, which makes it a flexible and customizable solution that can be tailored to meet the unique requirements of different companies and industries. With Sidekick, companies can scale support with content, not headcount, and focus on what's most valuable for their business.