Tony Tom is the Founder and CEO of Orca, an AI-first customer support platform built for B2B companies with the account — not the ticket — at the center. He spent roughly a decade in product management for B2B companies, including a stretch at ZoomInfo, where he kept running into the same problem: the voice of the customer rarely made it back to the teams building the product. Orca started as a bridge between go-to-market and R&D and evolved into a support platform that lives inside Slack, email, and Discord, auto-triages and groups messages into account-level context, turns Loom videos into documentation, and lets teams query their support data in natural language.
“Most of the ticketing platforms are built for horizontal use cases. It's more ticket is the center of that platform. But we see pre-sales, or anything until sales closure, is always account, account, account.”
“You have to keep account in your hands to cater to them, pamper them throughout. But when we get into post-sales, that gets stopped. Account is nowhere to be seen. So we want to bring that back in.”
“By default, every AI company starts there — how to answer this question. But when it comes to B2B, it's very contextual.”
“All that can be used to treat the account better, not just treat the ticket better.”
“A champion might not be happy, but the users could always be happy. That's another scenario.”
“Four times in a year, you're paying $20,000, $50,000 for a product. You talk to them four times a year, you have 30 minutes. How do you convey all of this?”
“Now all our customers can mute their customer Slack channels and just look at Orca to be in the whole spectrum of listening to customers.”
“We believe in enabling AI to suggest answers rather than just auto-answering, especially in the B2B, very technical, very contextual questions.”