On Sprout they were announced last week as 'Startup of the week'. The platform for starters even spoke of the 'holy grail' in the call center world. Contexta360, which recently received a capital injection of one million euros, focuses on the real-time analysis of telephone conversations. But hasn't the latter been happening for a while now?

Contexta360 started at the end of 2016. Only for more than a year has the market been treated with a working solution. Before that, the team has been busy with product development, after it was concluded that the quality of existing solutions was not good enough. Collaborated with development Laurens van der Werf, who is part of the same department within the University of Twente as Arjan van Hessen.

According to Contexta360 COO Mark van der Peet (photo) the technology of existing suppliers who have been active for some time can now be regarded as 'legacy': “If you want to look for product names in real time during conversations, then nine out of ten vendors are not far enough with their solution . This has to do with the age of the core of those solutions. Our technology has a modular structure and is suitable for training in a very short time on the jargon of a specific company. We can have our solution operational in two to four weeks, while competitors often take several months.”

 

An investment in a speech solution seems to be at odds with the trend that companies want to automate customer contact.

“We see that it is difficult for companies to respond to customers in a consistent manner. For example, because turnover is high. A lot of attention is paid to that consistency in training. With real-time speech recognition, agents are guided to the right information during the conversation.”

The real-time speech analysis solutions from Contexta360 run in a private cloud of Microsoft Azure. Conversations are therefore also processed there, but Van der Peet states that Contexta360 is in control of the location of the data. And if a customer so wishes, for example with a view to GDPR, the application can also run on premise.

 

With all conversations in the cloud, you do have the ideal training ground for chatbots to train them in the background in the meantime. Is that part of your strategy?

“In any case, our strategy is to get a lot out of conversations. Like chatbot technology, our solutions are largely focused on getting the intent clear. But the dialogues in chatbots are different from natural dialogues. Part of the spoken customer contact cannot be automated and we want to get more value from those contacts that will not be automated in the next five years. We think that 50 to 60 percent of customer inquiries are handled by employees for the time being. We also see companies returning from the use of chatbots.”

The idea behind Contexta360 is a multi-solution platform focused on employee support (emotion recognition, next best action) and quality and compliance monitoring. Contexta360 applications are now being used by Vodafone-Ziggo and other Dutch customers including KPN, Conduent, Centraal Beheer, Knab and SVB.

With the real-time analysis, the company wants to focus on companies with larger call volumes: more than 200.000-300.000 per year. Facility contact centers also explicitly belong to the target group of Context360. According to Van der Peet, there is still a lot to be gained when it comes to steering based on quality, which is still often done manually. “With our solution we can automatically check whether a complete procedure is being followed. That is hardly possible for quality employees.”

Text: Erik Bouwer

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