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A Melbourne-based software company using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse customer interactions and cut down wait times has raised $5 million (USD$3.5 million) in a funding round led by Bonfire Ventures.
Operative Intelligence’s raise also saw participation from Wonder Ventures – a US venture capital firm that has invested in the likes of coupon company Honey, crypto exchange platform Coinbase and drone flight plan app AirMap.
Founded in 2019 by brothers Peter and James Iansek, Operative Intelligence captures customer interactions across communication channels such as voice, chat, online reviews and customer warranty requests.
From there, the data is automatically analysed by the platform, providing a breakdown of the root cause for a customer’s enquiry, the contact resolution rate and the customer satisfaction rate.
“We’re proud to have bootstrapped the company from an idea to an end-to-end production stack, serving customers globally since day one,” Operative Intelligence co-founder and CEO Peter Iansek said.
“This latest investment will allow us to accommodate our rapid growth projections and propel our journey to help thousands of organisations to unlock the true value of their customer service interactions, at scale.”
According to market researcher Fortune Business Insights, the global contact centre software market size was USD$26.93 billion (AUD$40.2 billion) in 2021.
The sector is expected to grow from USD$30.74 billion (AUD$45.9 billion) in 2022 to USD$78.75 billion (AUD$117.5 billion) in 2029, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 14.4 per cent.
Operative Analytics claims to have helped its clients reduce enquiry volume by 31 per cent through interactive voice response (IVR) optimisation, as well as increase first-call resolution on the largest customer pain point by 33 per cent.
Its clients include Australian accounting software multinational MYOB, Utah-based lawn company Orbit and US consumer bank Apple Federal Credit Union.
"It's staggering to think that there's over $49 billion in pure waste every year in customer service that's just re-work in the US alone," Operative Intelligence co-founder and CPO James Iansek said.
"I had a hypothesis we could leverage machines and software to unlock the insight needed to fill the gap for businesses and Pete knew what it took to get a startup off the ground; we both knew we had to give it a go."
While the company is industry agnostic, it currently works with customers in financial services, consumer services, insurance, healthcare, e-commerce, travel, and business process outsourcing.
Bonfire Ventures Managing Director Mark Mullen added that the brothers have built an intuitive solution to improve the customer experience at a time when needs are heightened.
“We are delighted to be supporting Operative Intelliegence’s mission to modernise contact center solutions and have seen the impressive strides they’ve made with their enterprise customers,” Mullen said.
“We look forward to their next moves to utilise AI technology to reshape an untapped space.”
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