Alex Mitchell, President and co-founder of StepOne, photo courtesy of StepOne

Alex Mitchell, President and co-founder of StepOne, photo courtesy of StepOne

StepOne, an Austin-based startup that makes customer support software, announced that it secured $4 million in venture capital.

LiveOak Venture Partners led the round with participation from Silverton Partners. The company plans to use the money to add employees and to expand sales and marketing efforts.

StepOne has already landed Telstra, Australia’s largest telecomm company, as a customers as well as a major U.S. cable company.

StepOne’s flagship product, Contextual Care, focuses on helping large companies with complex products deliver excellent customer support.

Although lots of products currently exist to help companies deliver self-service customer support, StepOne has a different approach. It “predicts a customer’s question by measuring hundreds of customer attributes like what services they’ve purchased, the state of their billing cycle and the technical performance of the product, and then matches the customer to the optimal content for their predicted question,” according to a news release. “The adaptive software continuously learns which specific pieces of support content best serve various customers, improving its accuracy over time.”

“From product onboarding to in-life support, self-service for customers is broken,” Alex Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of StepOne, said in a news release. “Even though most customers prefer to solve problems themselves, they give in and finally pick up the phone. There is too much content presented to solve the problem and too many irrelevant results in search queries. Our goal is to make self-service become a driver of customer loyalty and cost savings. When you can answer the customer’s question before they’ve even asked it, they’ll stick with you.”

Last year, LiveOak Ventures invested an undisclosed amount of seed stage funding into StepOne.

“Since our seed investment, the StepOne team has achieved significant customer traction, so we are delighted to continue to support the StepOne team as they scale their operations,” Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and general partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said in a news release.