Meet the founders: Rhett Trickett
In this series, we sit down and chat with each of the founders to unpack their vision for Cue, how they came to find the company, and the insights they have learned along the way.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I’m Rhett Trickett, one of the co-founders of Cue. I was born and grew up in South Africa but now live in Copenhagen with my fiancée and young daughter. I head up our Product team that delivers our software to our customers. My job is to understand our customers’ needs and ensure our team gives them solutions that are better than any of the competitors in the market.
You’re from Durban but based in Denmark, how did that happen?
Yeah, I’ve lived in a few places over the years. I was born in Empangheni in South Africa, and since then have lived in Durban, Nelspruit, Johannesburg, Cape Town, London and now Copenhagen. When I was younger I always wanted to move to a bigger city to explore what it had to offer. Then after London, I realised that bigger is not always better and started to gain more appreciation for smaller cities, space and nature. So we moved to Copenhagen for more of that and to be closer to my fiancée’s family in southern Sweden.
What is your mission in life? What inspires you?
I’m hugely inspired by the technology that humans have created. The fact that we’re able to harness electrical energy and use it to operate wireless communication devices like smartphones over the internet is incredible. So I love working with technology to continuously learn more about how it’s all built. I also really love watching people push past the boundaries of what’s been done before, in any discipline, which is kind of related to the above.
So I guess I would say I’m driven to work with people who want to build technologies that are better than what has been done before. Granted we just work with software and are standing on the shoulders of electrical engineering giants but I guess the software we create to help businesses is our way of contributing to society. As for my mission in life, eventually, I’d love to work on a technology education project. For example, a technology education website or setting up academies in various towns around South Africa to create new hubs and help them to generate income that would flow into their communities.
What do you get up to in your spare time?
Hanging out with my family, trawling YouTube for music mixes and old record uploads, and tinkering with various technologies, programming languages, APIs, Raspberry Pis, networking protocols and so on.
What would you be doing if you weren’t building Cue?
I love entrepreneurship and technology so it would definitely be some kind of startup.
What has the experience been like building the dev team to scale the Cue product?
Honestly, I feel really excited that we’ve managed to find and convince some super smart and capable people to join our team and help build the Cue platform. We’re putting a lot of thought into our platform that will let customers get the most out of any digital channel they choose. So I’m looking forward to us releasing the first version and then the more interesting features that we’ll be able to release in the future with the foundations that we’ve set.
Without giving away our trade secrets, what is the vision for Cue?
To provide a single platform that a business can use to manage their customer support across every communication channel.
What are the biggest customer pain points that Cue is attempting to solve?
1. Having a single place to manage customer communication across all digital channels
2. Enabling businesses to use more modern channels, like WhatsApp
3. Automating common customer support and sales queries
What sets Cue apart from its competitors?
Most customer support software does one channel really well, for example, email or web chat. But other channels are added on as a kind of an afterthought. We’re building Cue to be omnichannel from the ground up and so this enables a business to get the best out of every channel’s unique features. On Cue, you can create the best possible customer service experience for each digital channel and have it all come into the same platform.
What features are the team working on right now?
We’ve spent the last few months working on rebuilding our entire platform from the ground up to allow it handle any channel a business needs to communicate on.
The first channels we’ll support will be WhatsApp, Messenger web chat and email, and during the next year we’ll be rapidly adding new channels like Instagram, Twitter, Google Business Messages, iOS/Android SDKs and eventually start voice and video so that businesses have a single platform they can use to manage all of their customer service conversations and automations.
Our new live chat Inbox will work across all channels with many improvements to enable agents to help customers faster. Our new flow builder will allow businesses to visually build chatbots on any channel that can integrate with their own APIs to automate a lot of common customer service requests.
Then, of course we’re also working with some of the new AI technologies (LLMs) that power ChatGPT which have shown incredible potential to change the customer service software industry massively. After ChatGPT was released things have been moving extremely quickly in this space with lots of new other technologies popping up weekly. We’ll have more to say about this later on in the year though.
