Anyone who’s been stuck on hold with the cable company knows there has to be a better way to handle customer-service calls. Investors are putting more cash behind a Boston-area company that thinks it has a solution.
Interactions LLC, which counts Hyatt Hotels Corp. and health insurer Humana Inc. among its clients, is setWednesday to announce it has raised $56 million to help expand its operations. The company, headquartered in Franklin, employs about 320 people and plans to grow its existing 15,000-square-foot offices by a third this fall.
The company’s software runs automated call-center systems for other businesses that let you speak rather than punch buttons to get connected with an agent.
Interactions’ systems also use human workers to make a decision when background noise, an unfamiliar accent, or some other complication makes it hard for the software to decipher a spoken command.
Those people, who primarily work for third-party staffing firms, don’t get on the phone and talk to the caller. Instead, they sit at a computer monitor, where they’re served up snippets of audio and asked to make a ruling about what the caller is seeking.
Data analysts can then pore over the questions that tripped up the software and attempt to tweak the system to handle similar problems the next time around.
Interactions, a private company, wouldn’t disclose specific sales figures, but said revenue doubled last year. The new investment was led by Revolution Growth, NewSpring Capital, and Comcast Ventures. The company raised a $40 million round of investment in 2013.
Art Schoeller, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc., said making call centers cheaper and faster is a tantalizing idea for any business with a sizable customer-service operation. “To talk to a call-center agent is going to cost eight or nine bucks. To talk to an automated system is going to cost 10 cents. You do the math,’’ he said.
But companies like Interactions must work to convince potential customers that it’s a good idea to hand over their critical customer relationships to an outside vendor. Many companies will try to build their own systems, even though letting a specialist handle the job is likely a better move for lots of businesses, Schoeller said.
“You probably turn your website over to an agency anyway,’’ he said. “The same thing applies here, in speech systems. You should have people who do this all the time. And I think, for a broad swath of the market, you’ll see more and more companies finally get some religion and say, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ’’
Tech companies and investors are putting more money behind “virtual assistants’’ and other artificial-intelligence systems, betting that software is going to get much better at answering complex questions.
Apple Inc.’s Siri and Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa systems, for example, are becoming household names for many consumers, while Facebook Inc. is allowing companies to build “bots’’ that automatically answer customer questions online.
But even the biggest names in tech are known to farm out some of their customer-service work, Schoeller said. “They won’t tell you that they have Apple as a customer, but Apple’s customer-service line actually utilizes Interactions,’’ he said. Interactions declined to comment on its relationship with Apple.
Interactions chief executive Mike Iacobucci said the company didn’t spend a lot of time talking up its artificial intelligence and machine-learning chops in years past. But it’s hoping to take advantage of the spotlight.
“We worked all that magic in the background,’’ he said. “Here it is, 10 years later, and we’ve done this at scale.’’
Curt Woodward can be reached at curt.woodward@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @curtwoodward.
