How Parallel goes the extra mile in customer communication

Meet Shreya

Shreya sits on the BizOps team at Parallel, the company building “Google for AI agents”.

She describes her role as “anything that’s not direct engineering or sales”, including support.

Meet Miles

The AI customer agent Parallel built on Parahelp is called Miles.

The name comes from something the team always says internally: “you always want to go the extra mile”. The team wants customers to get the most they can out of Parallel and to be as proactive as possible.

Today, Miles takes the first pass at all of Parallel’s tickets.

Shreya remembers her “Parahelp aha moment”. A customer asked to get on a call with Miles, thinking that Miles was a person.

Shreya hopped on the phone instead.

“The customer actually asked where Miles was.”
- Shreya

That was the moment she thought, “Wow, this is really going to work”.

Resolving urgent tickets

Some tickets need immediate attention from engineering or a leader.

Shreya puts the challenge as two questions:

“How do you capture important, urgent things at the right time? And how do you actually triage that internally?”
- Shreya

Parallel’s answer was to connect Miles to incident.io and Slack.

When a customer reaches out with an issue, and Miles deems it a new incident, it uses Parallel to search and evaluate the customer’s strategic importance. If the issue and customer meet a threshold, Miles triggers an incident and pages the on-call engineering team.

Once the incident is resolved, Shreya gets a proposed follow-up in Slack. She checks that it is the right incident and the right information, and accepts it.

Once accepted, the response goes out to “not only every customer that has reached out, but any customer that has shared an adjacent issue” over the past few hours.

What changed

At the end of the week, Shreya sometimes sees customers that say “thanks Miles, this was really helpful”, “thanks Miles, my concern was resolved”, or “thanks Miles, the billing issue was taken care of”.

How Shreya describes Parahelp:

“Parahelp is the company that has taken our customer comms from people responding when they have free time to an always-on response system.”
- Shreya