UPDATED 09:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 15 2020

AI

Contact center startup Observe.ai raises $54M in new round of funding

Call center software startup Observe.AI said today it has closed on a sizable $54 million round of funding that brings its total amount raised to $88 million.

Menlo Ventures led the Series B round, with participation from Next47 Ventures and NGP Capital.

While companies like Google LLC are busy using artificial intelligence to try to help call centers automate most of their conversations, Observe.ai is taking a different approach. It’s using its AI platform to assist human call center operators, instead of replacing them outright.

The company’s software platform uses natural language processing technology to analyze conversations between human operators and customers. The calls are automatically transcribed, and the software then performs sentiment analysis to try and determine customer satisfaction. It also tries to draw correlations between the words and actions of the agent, and the customer’s level of happiness.

Observe.ai says these capabilities should be interesting for any company that operates a call center, as most are only able to analyze between 1% and 2% of customer calls manually. Moreover, the company’s software helps by surfacing opportunities for companies to improve the customer call experience and better support its operators.

For example, the best-performing call center agents can be used as benchmarks to determine what works, and this information can then be used to train new or underperforming staff. Observe.ai’s platform can also detect what the company calls “dead air,” or gaps in the conversation, and try to figure out where the agent may have knowledge gaps that caused this silence. Interestingly, the software can even differentiate between different kinds of silence, so if an agent puts a caller on hold, it will know that person hasn’t just come up short on a question.

Observe.ai’s platform can also help companies to fulfill any compliance obligations they might have, by identifying any agents that may not be using the correct phrases during a call.

Those capabilities have ensured rapid growth for the company, which says its revenue has increased by 600% in the last year, though as a privately held company it doesn’t provide specific numbers. During that time, it has added more than 150 new customers and 20,000 agent licenses.

“Today’s contact center is mired with inefficient workflows and lack of data-driven training for frontline agents who represent the voice of the company,” Observe.ai co-founder and Chief Executive Swapnil Jain, said in a statement. “By leveraging AI to analyze customer interactions, businesses will turn their contact centers into growth centers. This latest round of funding is a direct result of the trust we’ve built with customers and investors, and the dedication of our team.”

Observe.ai said it plans to use the new funds to expand its go-to-market programs. It also wants to step up research and development efforts so it can add new capabilities to its platform around real-time coaching, interaction analytics and omnichannel support.

Photo: guvo59/pixabay

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