Today, agent-customer communication is no less than a currency for businesses. Whether conducted through telephonic calls or chat platforms, each of these conversations can not only help a company understand how its agents are addressing customer queries/concerns but also provide critical insights to figure out what is working for them and what is not – in terms of products, promotions, processes, and services.

However, the thing is, when conversations happen on the scale of millions per day (only growing), generating the said insights becomes quite a task. Manual grading methods fail not to go beyond conversational quality, while automated solutions only work with a small fraction of conversations and take at least eight months to analyze the data. So, by the time they offer results, the data is stale and the intelligence is no longer relevant for the business.

It’s against this backdrop where Dallas-based Talkmap, a startup that offers a conversation intelligence platform to help enterprises obtain actionable insights from customer interactions, comes in.

Talkmap’s real-time conversation intelligence platform

To solve this challenge, Tim Moss and his team at TalkMap turned towards leveraging AI to deliver a near-real-time analysis of customer conversations. The company, founded in 2017, developed an easy-to-use cloud SaaS platform – Talkdiscovery – that ingests raw, unstructured information from all customer calls and chats with enterprise agents and then labels, structures, and analyzes those interactions on an ongoing basis, giving the enterprise near real-time insights into customers conversations.

The platform leverages AI/ML to identify patterns from customer data that point to the best opportunities for business. Then, the identified information is visualized through dashboards, making it easy for every person with customer-facing responsibility to access & act on the data.

“Talkmap integrates seamlessly with existing customer data platforms, customer relationship platforms, and customer engagement platforms to deliver unprecedented visibility into customers across every area of an enterprise,” Moss said.

The insights generated from the platform can eventually be used to accelerate bot development and automation efforts as well as to identify risks and opportunities associated with its product, operations, sales, and marketing efforts – thereby increasing revenue. It can also capture the best practices in the communication script to optimize agent performance and drive greater return on call center and contact center customer experience investments. 

According to a McKinsey study, companies that leveraged customer behavioral insights outperformed their peers by 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margin.

Competitors

A number of CCaaS solutions are looking to target the conversation intelligence problem with analytics, including Genesys Cloud CX, Five9, and Talkdesk. However, Talkmap claims to differentiate on the basis of real-time action across channels.

“Although the CCaaS is certainly overpopulated with a number of substantial and successful companies – all fighting for similar narratives, there are unfortunately no good examples in the marketing that allow a CXO/CIO executive to ingest their conversation data in real-time across multiple omnichannel platforms, automatically train their AI/ML models from that data, and in real-time allow the enterprise to see and use that conversation data and fully understand the context of that conversation. It does not exist in the market today that we are aware of, according to our customers and partners,” Moss said.

Talkmap, announced today that it has raised $8 million in a series A round led by Stage 1 Ventures.

With this round of funding, which takes TalkMap’s total capital to $17.6 million, the CEO plans to grow its customer base in North America and further drive innovation in its core conversation intelligence platform.

“Our priorities in 2022 will be investing in our platform capabilities and integrations with our partners, expanding our team for our CCaaS GTM strategy, and sales/marketing investment to scale with our customers and partners heading into 2023,” he said.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global contact center as a service (CCaaS) market was $3.07 billion in 2019 and could grow 16% to $10.06 billion by 2027.