Workforce Engagement Management specialist, Playvox has expanded its set of service offerings with the acquisition of interaction analytics specialist Prodsight for an undisclosed sum. It marks a timely recognition that agent productivity, performance and happiness is closely linked to understanding customer intents and successfully resolving their problems.

For almost a decade, Playvox has built a successful business providing enterprises with software and resources that focus on improving the performance of contact center agents. The spectrum of solutions it provides are mapped into the well-defined disciplines of Quality Assurance, Performance Management, Coaching, Learning, Voice of the Customer, Workforce Management, and Agent Motivation. Its acquisition of Prodsight – which it rapidly renamed Playvox Customer AI – shows that Playvox and its customers recognize the value of insights contained in the conversations between companies and their customers, not the static options captured when an agent initiates a trouble ticket or a customer answers a post call survey.

Prodsight was founded in 2017 and built a fast-growing business around text-analytics fortified with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and applied to conversations carried out between companies and their customers over messaging and chat. Its value proposition is around ease of implementation and the short time it takes to begin to extract insights from conversations. Prodsight’s value to Playvox and its customers is easy to understand. Roughly 50% of Playvox’s existing customers do no voice-based customer support at all. They will immediately benefit from putting Playvox Customer AI to use.

The promise of immediate results and the ability to integrate with leading cloud-based CRM-plus-Contact Center solutions like Zendesk and Kustomer, are big selling points with business customers. They are also testaments to the appeal of the Conversational Cloud. Playvox The solution is designed to “improve not replace” the resources underlying human connections and experience. Playvox Customer AI solution starts with “feedback aggregation”, capable of synchronizing with multiple sources of customer feedback, like MailChimp, Zendesk, G2 and transcripts. The “special sauce” involves conducting proper data hygiene or, in some cases, translation of these these conversational data and then subjecting them to topic discovery, intent detection and sentiment analysis in order to determine the root issues raised in the conversation. The system can then provide insights to personnel that can do something about them; be it counseling a rude agent, resolving login issues or refunding a mistaken charge.

Part of the appeal is that no data scientists or knowledge management experts are needed. Playvox Customer AI is available today. The future enhancements include applying the analytic lens to provide employee engagement insights (scheduled for the first half of this year), followed by “automated quality” analysis in the 2nd half of 2021.

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