Naturally, secondary voice-based services will now emerge: Voice-based SEO, for instance. But that’s just on the consumer side. Enterprise voice data must be studied, too, which is why AI-based voice analytics platform VoiceOps has just left stealth to a seed round with the participation of Accel, Founders Fund and Lowercase Capital. VoiceOps works by transcribing phone calls and using their artificial intelligence engine to parse the information in order to provide insights such as an individual employee’s core skillset and any week-over-week trends. Here’s my interview with the co-founder and CEO of VoiceOps, Daria Evdokimova. In it, she discusses the company’s business model, its foundation in cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, and what lessons any entrepreneur can draw from the company’s challenges and successes. We transcribe calls, parse at better-than-human quality, and then break down those conversations into core skills. That helps us analyze what behavior is most successful (e.g. how many probing questions to ask on a call, what’s the value of describing benefits vs. features, when to time an upsell or close attempt, etc.). Once we understand what works, we help managers scale that out, improving performance across their entire team. In short, we help sales teams close more deals.” The other very important piece is the more recent advances in Machine Learning – it’s only now becoming possible to have a large scale voice analytics operation because of the recent advancements in speech to text, machine learning algorithms, and the cost of computing power becoming extremely cheap.” From a very early stage, we were extremely focused on not pricing ourselves out of business, which meant we needed to build real value into our product, i.e. the output needs to have an impactful return on investment. For our users, saving time by automating and providing accurate data for sales coaching is great. But by improving core sales processes we’re able to show an increase in metrics like successful close attempts and revenue. That’s where we become indispensable for our customers. Understanding how we can provide the most value to our customers, and then executing on it will always be the challenge we’re most focused on.” The other piece of advice I can give is to be the expert in whatever space you’re attacking. So many parts of starting a company are sales oriented, whether it’s recruiting, fundraising, or actually selling your product or service to clients. Having a passion for what you’re doing helps with selling, but being the most knowledgeable in the room about your subject matter builds credibility, and having credibility as a first-time entrepreneur is no easy feat. In other words, make sure no one else knows more than you about your business.” However, almost every customer we’ve onboarded has rolled out VoiceOps to other teams within their company. Eventually our goal is to serve every single function of a company that relies on calls to be successful, be it sales, support, customer success, or compliance. Eventually, we believe we can become the hub of all voice data for the enterprise.”
