On a trip to Manila- the major call center in the world- Swapnil Jain accomplished that there is a requirement for improvement in call center operations. “We went to Manila to see some of the world’s biggest contact centers in action. During our trip, we were shocked to see how inefficiently agents were working because of outdated processes and technologies,” said Jain.
He with his two co-founders, Akash Singh and Sharath Keshava, realized that one out of every two customers faces difficulty with their customer call experience. The founders with the help of their technical knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a solution to this problem and created Observe.ai.
Observe.ai is a voice AI platform that performs a regular and automatic evaluation of all the calls at customer care centers. “Customer care experience is very bad. The companies randomly pick up 1 percent of the calls for monitoring and teaching purposes,” said Jain. Observe.ai evaluates 100 % of the calls moving forward for better coaching and training of the call agents.
Founded in 2017, Observe.ai establishes that it evaluates more than 250,000 calls each day. It has provided thousands of voice customer service agents across seven countries to provide better customer experiences. Some of the customers of Observe.ai are Concentrix, Talkdesk, Mitel, Microsoft, Sysco, Employee Bridge, John Paul, and GroupOne Auto.
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Observe.ai is also automatizing a range of basic and repetitive functions performed at call centers by agents, allowing them to focus on cases where human intervention is needed.
Verticalization of AI is the key
With the advancement of technology and AI, according to Jain what makes his or any other AI company stand out is the target on a particular segment and sector. AI generally evaluates four things- text, speech, images and videos. But what makes it different from other AI platforms is the focus on the voice customer services. We evaluate just text and speeches and we have a huge data set focusing on maintaining the call experience. It will tire out if we try to make Alexa because the data that we have gathered and worked on is very different from the one that the AI of Alexa has.
San Francisco- headquartered Observe.ai has an office in Bangalore as well. Thinking about why the company is headquartered in San Francisco- Though there are a lot of call centers in India, most of the end customers are the people staying in the US. Coming from India and witnessing the call center scenario has enabled me with a lot of business insights and wisdom and using those insights while staying near end customers made more sense for our company.
Observe.ai in December rose a funding of $26 million led by Scale Venture Partners. Andy Vitus, partner at scale, will be joining the Observe.ai board. Observe.ai plans to increase its revenue by four times and team size by three times in 2020.
