The fresh round of funding would be used to expand its offices around the world and bring hire teams to improve its current offerings.
The customer service industry spends over $400 billion per year globally, and in recent years, companies have turned to AI and automation to reduce costs. Research indicates that 46% of customer interactions were automated as of 2021. This has led to an increase in investment in contact center automation software startups, such as Invoca, Replicant, PolyAI, Observe.ai, and Parloa.
Parloa is a technology company that provides AI-powered automation solutions for contact centers. According to recent news reports, the company has raised $27 million in a funding round.
With this new funding, Parloa aims to expand its operations and enhance its AI-powered automation solutions to improve customer service and support in contact centers. The company’s platform uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to automate various tasks and processes, such as call routing, customer inquiries, and support ticket handling.
Parloa’s technology can help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences by automating routine tasks and enabling agents to focus on more complex issues. The company’s solutions have already been adopted by several large enterprises, including BMW, Deutsche Telekom, and E.ON.
Overall, this funding round is expected to fuel Parloa’s growth and help the company establish itself as a leading provider of AI-powered automation solutions for contact centers.
Parloa’s CEO, Malte Kosub, believes that AI is poised to disrupt the customer service market. He noted that the status quo in customer service is not satisfactory in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. Therefore, the speed of AI adoption in customer service will be the same in these regions.
It is interesting to note that, Parloa was initially an internal project at Future of Voice, a conversational AI agency that Kosub co-launched with Stefan Ostwald in 2017. The two founders built a low-code tool for developing “multi-channel voice experiences” for Future of Voice’s clients, which they named Parloa.
In 2020, they sold Future of Voice and recruited the employees who had been working on Parloa to help scale the software independently.
Parloa offers various apps and services that can be combined via low-code drag-and-drop dashboards to power contact center automation flows. For example, Parloa’s speech-to-text module, powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, can be combined with its natural language understanding models to create a phone dialogue tree. The company’s integrations with third-party text-generating models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, can be connected with the speech-to-text module to answer commonly asked customer questions and complaints.
