It is estimated that over $400 billion is spent annually to operate customer contact centers worldwide. To reduce costs, contact centers are adopting AI and automation in recent years. According to The Harris Poll, 46% of customer interactions are already automated by 2021.
This is good news for vendors selling contact center automation software. VCs certainly think so, judging by the recent uptick in investment. Startups like Invoca, Replicant, PolyAI and Observe.ai have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from backers in the past year alone, reflecting a bullish view of labor-saving customer service technology.
Another winner of the contact center automation boom is Germany-based enterprise software that uses a combination of conversational AI techniques and low-code tools to help companies offload the work of contact center workers. Parloa, the provider. Parloa announced today that he has raised €20 million (approximately $21.67 million) in a Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Newion and Senovo.
With Parloa’s total raised of €25 million (approximately $27.09 million), the fresh cash will be used for customer acquisition efforts, opening US offices and product R&D.
“AI is now waiting to completely disrupt the billion-dollar customer service market,” co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub said in an email interview with TechCrunch. It’s the same in Africa, the US, the customer experience is not good, so the speed of AI adoption in customer service will be the same in those areas as well.”
Parloa started as an internal effort at Future of Voice, a conversational AI agency co-founded by Kosub in 2017 with Stefan Ostwald. bot) was used for the Future of Voice client, codenamed Parloa. In 2020, Kosub and Ostwald sold Future of Voice and hired the employees who worked on Parloa so they could scale the software independently.
Parloa provides a patchwork of apps and services that can enhance your contact center automation flow when meshed via a low-code drag-and-drop dashboard. For example, Parloa’s speech-to-text module, powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s set of API-based AI services, can be combined with Parloa’s natural language understanding model to create a telephone dialogue tree. Alternatively, Parloa’s integration with third-party text generation models, including his recently released OpenAI GPT-4, can be connected with the aforementioned speech-to-text module to answer common customer questions and complaints. can.
Parloa connects various modules and services to help automate your contact center. Image credit: talk about it
More specifically, typical businesses use Parloa’s tools to create phone answering bots that automatically understand what their customers are calling (such as billing address changes) and answer questions in natural language. I can answer. Or you can use Parloa’s translation tools to enable your customer service agents to speak to customers in multiple languages.
Parloa’s approach isn’t exactly new — many contact center platforms offer the same type of setup — but the startup believes its platform is superior in some respects from a technical standpoint. claim. For example, Parloa claims its AI tools, apps, and modules reduce spelling errors and other “undesirable speech patterns” during calls, allowing you to continue listening while conversations pause naturally. doing.
“The pandemic has particularly driven increased demand for digital customer service, which we at Parlor are helping automate,” said Kosub. “Customer service is as old as the business itself. Therefore, rather than inventing a new market landscape or focusing on a small sub-segment, we have established dozens of We are supporting a billion market.”
Kosub wouldn’t say exactly how many customers Parloa currently has. Except for a few big names like Decathlon and the German Red Cross. Silicon When asked about macroeconomic headwinds like the Valley Bank collapse, he countered with statistics he claims show one of the reasons the contact center automation market continues to grow. bottom. For Salesforce research.
“Companies have to deal with low agent availability, agent understaffing, and unattractive work. Much of agent time is spent on repetitive tasks that can be done by AI, such as authentication,” Kosub said. said Mr.
One might argue that it is better to avoid agent turnover through higher wages and better benefits, as opposed to automation. High production demands and lack of training are among the common complaints from workers in the industry. In 2021, her call center employees at Cigna, a healthcare giant, went so far as to circulate a petition demanding better working conditions.
Of course, investments in automation are easy to sell — especially in a recession. Parloa’s biggest challenge isn’t finding new customers, it’s standing out in a crowded arena. Luckily, Kosub says it can be done.
“There has been no slowdown or the impact of the pandemic at all. The demand for customer service has increased, and so has the pressure to be more efficient,” he said. “As a company, from his 30 employees at the time of seed funding, he has grown to over 100 in less than 12 months, with new participants from Google, Salesforce, SAP, TeamViewer and Celonis. rice field.”
