Announcing VoiceOps’ $9M Series A to help call centers invest in their people

It’s been a whirlwind year at VoiceOps. Over the last 12 months, we’ve deployed our AI coaching & training platform to some of the largest call centers in insurance, real estate, travel, and education. Several customers are hitting historic highs in their conversion rate, translating to millions of dollars in extra revenue. Early customers who spent $50k with us last year have 5X’d their spend to $250k after seeing stellar results.

Now it’s time to scale.

That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $9M from Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from our seed investors Accel and Y Combinator. Ajay Agarwal, one of Silicon Valley’s top enterprise SaaS investors, is joining our board.

People on TV talk at length these days about how AI and machine learning is automating away job after job, with call centers as one of the first industries in the crosshairs. This narrative isn’t what we see on the ground. Actually, our call center customers are spending more than ever before on the oldest technology of all: humans beings.

So why the disconnect between perception and reality?

What people looking at call centers from the outside don’t understand is that automation is fundamentally changing the role of a sales rep by augmenting them, not replacing them. With the internet, customers have more choices, and with more choices comes more buying power. So the way businesses compete is by building stronger, more personal relationships with their customers.

This means call center reps need an increasingly sophisticated toolkit. They need to be able to build trust with customers, understand what a customer really needs, and provide a tailored solution.

It’s not surprising, then, that coaching & training has quickly become a mission-critical, top 3 priority for our customers. Better coaching and training is how call centers adapt their workforce to meet the demands of the Internet age.

Some of our customers make 50,000 calls a day. The best technology most call centers have today to drive better customer conversations is to put on a headset, sit next to a rep, and listen to calls one at a time. Walk into any call center and you’ll see this workflow. It’s no wonder that coaching and training failures commonly become the bottleneck to performance goals.

We’re building the AI coaching & training platform. Our platform offers one place to get visibility into sales calls and to provide coaching to reps. Our customers plug into VoiceOps and immediately have a world-class coaching infrastructure at their fingertips.

The way it works is that we take a team’s recorded calls, transcribe them, and then use AI to analyze where and how the rep does the key behaviors on calls. We deliver the data back in an easy to read, beautiful transcript, and allow managers to jump right into teachable moments, and evaluate how often reps comply with the key behaviors across calls.

We’re on the cutting edge of NLP here — we’ve invested heavily in the ability to parse and structure a human conversation with unprecedented accuracy at scale. We’ve got a world-class data labeling operation, through which we’ve built the world’s largest datasets of sales behaviors.

Within 60 days, our customers see their sales conversion rate go up by 5% to 25%. Most B2B tools claim to drive ROI, but few have the robust AB testing evidence that we do. Penn Foster's conversion rates have never been higher, up 5 basis points from last year. International Cruises and Excursions is up several basis points from last year. This translates to millions of dollars of incremental revenue for our customers.

The evidence is clear: when reps receive effective coaching, their calls improve, they hit quota more often, and they make more money.

Our Series A represents the next stage. We’re still in the early innings of our goal to help call centers invest in their people. There’s a lot left to build, and we can’t do it alone. Our next order of business, with the new funding in hand, is to grow our amazing team. If you want to help call centers take the next big step forward, come join us.