Call it a pivot or call it evolution - Build Concierge is changing

The journey of a start-up is rarely linear. Some of the world’s best businesses started out doing something different and pivoted to meet a more pressing customer need. Airbnb started life renting air beds for $10 a pop. Slack was a messaging service for gamers. Nintendo used to sell playing cards. They all evolved when their founders realised there was a bigger, better mission for the company.

That’s just what we are doing here at Build Concierge .

We launched the business last year in response to a pain point: it was, and remains, very difficult for homeowners to find and manage tradesman to work on their property. We built a new platform, which helped people to skip the guesswork, coming directly to us for the best-in-class specialists across every trade.

Our service was truly unique, offering 24/7 support for everything from emergency repairs to planned renovations, leveraging our AI-enabled platform to manage all the works – we also developed a rigorous contractor vetting process.

We built a team in Leeds, created the technology from scratch, and ran a successful customer trial towards the end of the year. We completed hundreds of jobs successfully and our Trustpilot rating stood at 4.4 out of five, an incredible achievement for a start-up.

The right time and the right place - but the wrong model

We proved two things: there was a market for our service and people loved our solution. But we also discovered major friction points. As a third party, we could never fully own the diaries of the tradesmen on our books, which caused friction. We automated a lot of the process but there were still manual touchpoints that were slowing down the customer service team. 

As a serial entrepreneur, who has spent my career finding ways to use technology to make my ventures more efficient, I started looking for better ways of working.

This endeavour led me to discover a new focus. Instead of managing the relationship between the customer and trades businesses, we could create a software platform helping all businesses manage their customer communications and engagement better.

Build Concierge has now pivoted to become an omnichannel customer engagement platform, aimed at the entire service industry. We have ploughed all the learnings from the past year into a new AI-enabled SaaS package, which will help customers automate time-consuming processes and harmonise their existing software systems.

Taking customer service to a new level

With Build Concierge, companies will never miss a call again, and every customer interaction across every channel will be logged and turned into actionable data on our dashboard. Our system never sleeps, and our AI Concierge Advisors are trained to offer the right information at the right time, across text, image and video. 

We offer a consistent service to customers reaching out through email, SMS, voice call, WhatsApp, social media, and webchat. Using AI, we will augment existing customer service teams and software, remove pain points and help people offer unbeatable customer service. 

I am extremely excited by the potential of this new model. I have spent the past few months talking to prospective customers and the demand is off the charts. As soon as I sit down and explain what Build Concierge can do, people’s eyes light up. When they see the user interface, they can’t wait to get their hands on it.

Why wouldn't you want your own, personalised customer service supremo ensuring that you never miss an inbound lead? An AI Concierge Advisor with the ability to check in with customers independently, asking if they need help maintaining the boiler you fitted, or if they want to book in an annual service. This truly has the potential to boost revenues and profitability, not just efficiency. 

It's all about the learnings

I don’t see the first iteration of the business as a failure. We needed to go through the process to get to where we are now. But when we saw that the model wasn’t working, we “failed fast” and pivoted to a new solution. In the fast-paced world of technology, you don’t always get it right first time. 

I can’t sugarcoat it: this year, there has been a lot of soul-searching and a lot of tough conversations. I owed it to my incredible team to find a way to evolve Build Concierge into something better.

We have a new mission now at Build Concierge: to make every customer interaction feel effortless, responsive, and meaningful. Our vision is to be the world’s most trusted AI-powered customer engagement platform, redefining how service businesses connect with their customers. And from day one, we have committed to doing this in an ethical way - harnessing the intelligence of AI while retaining that all-important human touch.

We are launching a trial of the new platform later this year. Get in touch if you would like to find out more.