Operational Intelligence helps contact centers discover what customers really need

A business can have a good contact center, but ideally it can help customers before they have to call. Operations intelligence helps contact centers identify customer needs faster, improve automated requests, and reduce hold times. The Melbourne and Los Angeles-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Wonder Ventures.

Operative Intelligence was founded in 2019 by brothers Peter and James Ianesk, who have worked in customer service and contact centers for 25 years.

More than 10 years ago, James developed a method to find out why customers call a leading Australian health insurer. At the time, contact center systems didn’t have this information, so James developed a manual system to analyze thousands of post-it notes transcribed from customer conversations by contact center agents. These notes were then analyzed by a team using the “5 Whys” system to find the source of a problem. This enabled James to help this contact center increase its Net Promoter Score by 5x.

The brothers worked with fast-growing technology companies on their method and had been looking for a way to turn it into a software system for three years.

“What we discovered 10 years later was that every contact center we had ever worked in was still dealing with the same issues and there was still no solution on the market that generated the kind of insights that contact centers and businesses need to better meet to the needs of its customers at scale,” Peter, CEO of Operative Intelligence, told TechCrunch.

Operations intelligence gives contact centers insight into why their customers are contacting them, without wasting time switching between different data sources. The fully automated platform analyzes customer inquiries across multiple channels, including phone calls, emails, chat, web inquiries, social media, online reviews and customer warranty inquiries. It then provides reports on why customers contact companies.

Their platform also divides customer queries into prioritized lists. One describes the customer’s pain points and what these cost the company annually in service costs. Another reason is the questions that can be answered through self-service and the potential return on investment. Operational Intelligence also reports on contact center performance by location, team, and case, and agent effectiveness by case type.

One of Operative Intelligence’s clients used its data to prioritize resolving customer issues over introducing new features, resulting in a 32% reduction in call volume and a seven-digit reduction in service costs, according to James . Another switched more than half of calls to digital channels and reduced time spent on phone calls by 23%, leveraging best practices identified by Operational Intelligence.

The startup’s main competitors are NICE Nexidia, CallMiner, and Call Journey. James said Operative Intelligence stands out as the only platform that can automatically identify the root cause of a customer demand, requires no model training or business data labeling, and has ROI built into its insights. It can be implemented by a company in two weeks.

In an investment statement from Bonfire Ventures, Managing Director Mark Mullen said: “James and Peter have developed an intuitive solution to improve customer experience at a time of increasing demand. We look forward to their next steps in reimagining an unexplored space using AI technology.”