What is Observe.ai?

Observe.ai is an enterprise company that offers a voice AI platform to boost call center performance with live conversation intelligence. The company was founded in 2017 by Swapnil Jain, Akash Singh, and Sharath Keshava Narayana.
Observe’s co-founders started the company to improve the visibility and transparency of call center communication. Most companies, they acknowledge, have access to just 2% of countless interactions their brand has with customers.
There are three core elements to Observe’s product. Conversation Intelligence is an AI engine that transcribes and analyzes agent-customer conversations. This is supported by multiple AI-driven real-time and post-interaction features.

Observe.ai is an enterprise company that offers a voice AI platform to boost call center performance with live conversation intelligence. The company was founded in 2017 by Swapnil Jain, Akash Singh, and Sharath Keshava Narayana.

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How does Observe.ai work?

Observe’s co-founders started the company to improve the visibility and transparency of call center communication. Most companies, they acknowledged, have access to just 2% of the thousands or millions of interactions their brand has with customers.

The company’s contact center-specific large language model (LLM) enables clients to derive insights from 100% of their customer conversations. These insights increase the performance of frontline staff and drive better outcomes for the business such as increased sales and improved employee retention rates.

So how is this achieved? There are three core elements.

Conversation Intelligence

Conversation Intelligence is an AI engine that yields important insights from interactions. It achieves this via the transcription and analysis of agent-customer conversations that can help businesses:

Identify how top-performing employees overcome objections.
Discover the sometimes hidden drivers of customer dissatisfaction (DSAT).
Track new market needs.
Decipher the nuances, keywords, and phrases used in communication. Observe also uses machine learning to assess speaker volume, silence, speech rate, tone, and overtalk. This is then used to determine whether customer sentiment is positive or negative.
Uncover common inhibitors to sales conversion, and
Understand in detail what customers are saying about their products or services.

Real-time AI

According to Observe, real-time AI allows businesses to “grow revenue and improve outcomes by empowering sellers and agents with in-the-moment guidance and coaching.”

Two tools help sellers achieve this:

Agent Assist – this tool helps sellers better execute their calls and improve conversion rates with custom scripts, prompts, and alerts. Generative AI also clarifies when to use soft skills and can be used to reduce after-call work (AGW).
Supervisor Assist – as the name suggests, this tool provides supervisors with a 360-degree view of all active conversations. They can easily assist with difficult customer interactions and provide help or coaching where required.

Post-Interaction AI

Post-interaction AI enables the business to leverage insights and develop agent coaching workflows that change staff behavior across the organization.

Three tools are involved in the post-interaction phase:

Auto QA – a tool that provides agent performance insights so that supervisors can offer proactive coaching at scale. Auto QA also offers a calibration dashboard where businesses can set custom automation rules.
Quality Assurance – here, the business can review specific conversations and focus on the parts that require attention or have the most potential to drive positive change. Observe also eliminates “tool sprawl” as it houses call audio, transcripts, and quality control evaluation forms in a single interface.
Agent Performance & Coaching – for supervisors, this provides a curated set of metrics to monitor agent performance. AI also provides coaching recommendations based on the behavior, skill, or knowledge gaps of the agent in question.

Key investors

Observe.ai was part of the Winter 2018 cohort at Y Combinator and initially raised $8 million in August 2018 from Nexus Venture Partners, Hack VC, MGV, and others.

Nexus also took part in the company’s $26 million Series A round in December 2019, while Menlo Ventures, NGP Capital, and Next47 Ventures took part in a subsequent Series B round worth $54 million in September 2020.

Observe raised $125 million in Series C funding in April 2022. Softbank Vision Fund led the round, with Zoom, Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and others also taking part.

Key Highlights:

Founding and Purpose: Observe.ai, founded in 2017 by Swapnil Jain, Akash Singh, and Sharath Keshava Narayana, is an enterprise company that offers a voice AI platform designed to enhance call center performance through live conversation intelligence. The founders aimed to address the lack of visibility and transparency in call center interactions.
Enhancing Customer Conversations: Observe.ai’s voice AI platform is built to provide insights from 100% of customer conversations, addressing the common challenge of businesses having access to only a small fraction of their interactions. By leveraging AI, Observe.ai helps businesses derive valuable insights, improve frontline staff performance, increase sales, and enhance employee retention.
Three Core Elements: The core elements of Observe.ai’s platform include:
- Conversation Intelligence: This AI engine transcribes and analyzes agent-customer conversations to identify important insights. It helps businesses understand customer sentiment, keywords, phrases, and communication nuances. It also assists in overcoming objections and tracking new market needs.
- Real-time AI: Observe.ai offers tools like “Agent Assist” and “Supervisor Assist” that provide real-time guidance and coaching to sellers and agents during customer interactions. This helps improve call execution, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
- Post-Interaction AI: After conversations, Observe.ai enables businesses to leverage insights to develop agent coaching workflows. Tools like “Auto QA,” “Quality Assurance,” and “Agent Performance & Coaching” facilitate performance monitoring, coaching, and quality control.
Investors and Funding: Observe.ai participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 cohort and secured initial funding of $8 million in August 2018. The company subsequently raised funds through Series A, B, and C rounds, with notable investors including Nexus Venture Partners, Hack VC, MGV, Menlo Ventures, NGP Capital, Next47 Ventures, Softbank Vision Fund, Zoom, and Scale Venture Partners.