Is My dear that more than $400 billion is spent annually to operate customer service centers around the world. To reduce costs, in recent years, contact centers have embraced AI and automation; The Harris Poll investigation indicates that 46% of customer interactions were already automated as of 2021.
That’s good news for vendors selling contact center automation software. Venture capitalists believe that is certainly the case, judging by the recent surge in investment. Startups including Invoca, Replicant, PolyAI and Observe.ai have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from backers in the past year alone, reflecting optimistic views of labor-saving customer service technology.
Another winner in the rise of contact center automation is talk about it, a Germany-based enterprise software provider that uses a combination of conversational AI technology and low-code tools to help companies lighten the load on their contact center employees (or so the sales pitch goes). ). Parloa announced today that it has raised €20 million (~$21.67 million) in a Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures, with participation from Newion and Senovo.
The fresh cash, bringing Parloa’s total raised to €25 million (~$27.09 million), will be dedicated to customer acquisition efforts, opening a US office, and research and product development.
“AI is waiting right now to disrupt the multibillion-dollar customer service market forever,” co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The status quo in customer service is the same in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the US: it’s not a good customer experience. So also the speed of AI adoption in customer service will be the same in those areas.”
Parloa started as an internal effort at Future of Voice, a conversational artificial intelligence agency that Kosub co-launched with Stefan Ostwald in 2017. Kosub and Ostwald created a low-code tool for developing “multi-channel voice experiences” (for example, skills Alexa, phone bots) for Future of Voice clients, whom they called Parloa. In 2020, Kosub and Ostwald sold Future of Voice and recruited the employees who had been working at Parloa to help scale the software independently.
Parloa offers a mosaic of applications and services that, when combined via low-code drag-and-drop panels, can drive contact center automation workflows. For example, Parloa’s speech-to-text module, powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s suite of API-based artificial intelligence services, can be combined with Parloa’s natural language understanding models to create a tree. telephone dialogue. Or Parloa’s integrations with third-party text generation models, including OpenAI’s recently released GPT-4, could connect with the aforementioned speech-to-text module to answer frequently asked customer questions and complaints.
Parloa connects various modules and services to help automate contact centers. Image Credits: talk about it
To put it in more concrete terms, a typical business could use Parloa’s tools to create a phone answering bot that can automatically figure out why a customer is calling (for example, change their billing address) and answer their questions in natural language. Or you could use Parloa’s translation tools to allow your customer support agents to speak to customers in multiple languages.
Parloa’s approach isn’t exactly new—many contact center platforms offer the same kind of setup—but the startup claims its platform is technically superior in some ways. For example, Parloa claims that its AI tools, apps and modules can reduce misspellings and other “unwanted conversation patterns” during calls and continue listening during natural breaks in conversations.
“The pandemic was a particular driver for the increased demands for digital customer service, which we as Parloa are helping to automate,” Kosub said. “Customer service is as old as the business itself. So we are not inventing a new market environment or focusing on small sub-segments, but helping an established multi-billion dollar market with innovative technology.”
Kosub wouldn’t say exactly how many clients Parloa currently has, except for a few big names like Decathlon and the German Red Cross. When asked about macroeconomic headwinds like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, he responded with a stat he says illustrates one reason the contact center automation market will continue to grow: 71%. of agents thought about quitting their job in the past six months. according to a Salesforce studio.
“Businesses have to deal with declining agent availability, a shortage of staffing agents, and a lack of job appeal – much of an agent’s time is spent on repetitive tasks, such as authentication, that could be performed by AI,” Kosub said. .
One could argue that it is better to avoid agent turnover with higher wages and better benefits as opposed to automation. Common complaints from industry workers include high production demands and lack of training; in 2021, health giant Cigna’s call center workers came to circular a petition asking for better working conditions.
Investments in automation are an easier sell, of course, particularly in a down economy. Parloa’s biggest challenge is probably not finding new customers, but standing out in a crowded field. Kosub says that he’s up to it, thankfully.
“We were not affected at all by the slowdown or the pandemic. The demand for customer service is growing and the pressure to be more efficient is also increasing,” she said. “In corporate terms, we went from 30 employees during our initial funding to over 100 in less than 12 months, with new members from Google, Salesforce, SAP, TeamViewer and Celonis.”
