Interactions Corporation completed a financing round totaling $12 million, which is earmarked to support a “growing customer base, expand its marketing presence, and invest in new technology.” Leading the group of investors is Sigma Partners (with offices both in Boston and Menlo Park). Sigma has an interesting portfolio of high-tech investments that include voice analytics specialist CallMiner, as well Vlingo and Voxify.

Readers who are into pattern detection should see that these companies comprise small group of companies taking leadership in defining a better user experience that regards better speech recognition and language understanding as key to satisfactory fulfillment of each individual’s expectations.
Other participants in Interactions funding are North Hill Ventures, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, and Updata Partners.

Interactions achieved notoriety of sorts (at least for the speech-enabled customer service crowd) by publishing survey results depicting “overwhelming dissatisfaction with IVR.” The study, conducted by Liel Leibovitz, New York University Assistant Professor of Communications, and commissioned by Interactions, contained no real surprises. Respondents indicated that they found IVRs hard to use and that two-thirds prefer assistance by live agents. Interestingly 15% listed IVRs as their preferred channel for communications with their selected vendors.

The study validated the shortcomings of today’s IVRs, which Interactions and its investors has interpreted as a “experience gap” between live agents and IVRs. The products and services offered by Interactions seek to close the gap by providing what Opus Research has been calling “assisted self-service” – meaning that they introduce enough human input into the IVR experience to enable the system to recognize the intent of a call more quickly and respond most appropriately. This should lead to a higher success rate and correspondingly lower rates of dissatisfaction with the voice channel.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, user experience, IVR, investments