When it comes to customer service calls, businesses only monitor only about 1 to 2 percent of them on average. This makes collecting and analyzing data in an effort to improve how agents handle conversations with customers challenging, but for most companies, doing much more monitoring than that isn’t realistically scalable. San Francisco- and India-based startup Observe.AI is working to change that, offering companies machine learning-based call analytics that are easy to scale.
Observe.AI’s technology uses its artificial intelligence and speech recognition to transcribe all conversations between customers and agents and offer coaching and suggestions, not just a handful of them. This, Observe.AI’s founder Swapnil Jain argues, is what makes the technology powerful—the more conversations are analyzed, the smarter the recommendations for agents, who are uniquely important in today's business climate, Jain noted in a company statement:
“Legacy speech analytics systems are simply not meeting the needs of the world’s top brands. Today’s customer service agents have a unique ability to emotionally connect with customers and are often a brand’s only frontline representatives.”
Now, the company has raised $26 million in a Series A funding with a key investment from Scale Venture Partners, just as the company kicks off a new partnership with Microsoft that aims to expand its call analytics technology to Microsoft’s users via Microsoft’s Azure marketplace.
As Observe.AI looks to 2020, the company aims to quadruple its recurring revenue by the end of that year and continue to improve its technology. “[The new] investment will fuel our mission to elevate agent performance through AI-based coaching and insights.” In addition to Scale Venture Partners, other funding participants include Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, 01 Advisors, and Emergent Ventures. The latest round brought Observe.AI’s total investment to $34 million.