Invoca Raises $83M to Help B2C Businesses Offer Better Contact Centers
Phone calls are not the sexiest aspect of customer experience management. But if businesses fail to offer customers seamless and helpful service via phone calls, they can damage and even end crucial relationships.
The conversation intelligence company Invoca is helping businesses solve that problem by building personalized contact center services in addition to offering phone call analytics. As a result, Invoca just raised $83 million in Series F funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, four times the valuation of its last round in 2019.
Silver Lake Waterman led the round, which Invoca will use to accelerate product innovation and international expansion while fueling potential acquisitions. Product development will focus on Invoca’s personalized contact center service, a business need that the pandemic illuminated as customers depended more on remote communication.
The big picture for customer service innovation
COVID accelerated digital transformation, but now that we’re in year three of the post-pandemic world, organizations need to figure out how to mature 2020 innovations, building lasting, and effective, omnichannel customer experiences. Part of that will require getting phone calls and customer service journeys right.
Anyone who has called a customer service number recently knows that businesses have not yet universally determined how to solve this problem.
Sometimes, the answer is transforming an online-only experience into a phone call. The satellite provider Dish is quoted on Invoca’s website as saying, “With Invoca, we took an online conversion experience that had a throughput of less than 5% and took it into a phone call that closes in the high 60% range.”
But Invoca doesn’t just reengineer customer service experiences. It also provides analytics to help organizations figure out what’s working and how to optimize customer interactions. In fact, that’s where the company started. But now, it seems contact center-focused products will be at the core of the newly minted unicorn’s innovation.