For far too long, customer care service numbers have been anything but outdated. Users are forced to call numbers in a so-called touch-tone menu and confronted with long waiting times, while agents are obliged to spend 30-40% of their time doing repetitive tasks like authentications or routings.
Aiming to put an end to the call center madness and change the way businesses communicate with their customers, Berlin-based SaaS platform for conversational AI, Parloa has raised €4 million in funding.
The round saw the participation of VC firms such as Amsterdam-based Newion, Munich-based Senovo and angel investors, including Michael Wax and Erik Muttersbach (co-founders of Forto), Nicolas Peters (co-founder Signavio). The new cash will enable the startup to scale its operations, expand its international footprint and help companies worldwide to make their call centers more cost-efficient while enabling them to increase customer loyalty.
The company is enabling businesses to easily integrate AI technology into their customer service for unique consumer experiences at all relevant customer service touchpoints.
Malte Kosub, co-founder and CEO, Parloa said: “The lack of efficiency in many call centers not only results in frustrating customer experiences and unhappy agents, harming a company’s reputation significantly but also leads to very high costs for businesses. With Parloa, we provide a unique AI solution for companies to make their customer service smarter and more cost-efficient leading to happier and more loyal customers.”
Stefan Ostwald, co-founder, CTO and CPO, Parloa added: “We initially started as an agency for AI and built Parloa’s technology out of our own cash flow and profits. After having received huge demand for our software, we decided to make a spin-off and turned Parloa into a SaaS platform and successfully bootstrapped the company over the course of the past years into a multi-million business.”
The platform combines automated speech recognition and natural language understanding to enable companies to build automated dialogues for phone, chat, voice assistants and messenger – all in one place. The company claims its AI setup understands the same amount of words and contexts as a call center agent. It follows a low code and API-first approach and hence can be seamlessly integrated into any tech stack and used and trained by any employee – even without any technical background. The startup already works with the likes of Ergo, SwissLife, Decathlon, Admiral Direkt, HSE and the German Red Cross.