{"id":2247,"date":"2016-12-14T15:46:01","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T15:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/conversica-lands-34-million-series-b-to-build-intelligent-sales-assistants.html"},"modified":"2016-12-14T15:46:01","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T15:46:01","slug":"conversica-lands-34-million-series-b-to-build-intelligent-sales-assistants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/conversica-lands-34-million-series-b-to-build-intelligent-sales-assistants.html","title":{"rendered":"Conversica lands $34 million Series B to build intelligent sales assistants"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often\u00a0responding with an\u00a0introductory\u00a0email. Conversica<\/a> has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact emails, and pass it off to a human\u00a0salesperson when the time is right. Today, it announced\u00a0a $30 million investment.<\/p>\n

The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth. Toba Capital, Wellington Financial LP, Recruit Strategic Partners and Series A investor Kennet Partners also participated. Today\u2019s investment brings the total to $56 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cConversica is a conversational artificial intelligence platform,\u201d company CEO Alex Terry explained. The company\u2019s flagship product is an AI-powered sales assistant. Even though this assistant isn\u2019t actually a person, it has a name, its own email address and it acts on behalf of the company, just like a human would.<\/p>\n

In this case, the assistant is responsible for contacting anyone who has expressed some initial interest in the company\u00a0such as downloading a white paper, getting a\u00a0badge scanned at a conference or\u00a0requesting additional information on the company website. The\u00a0contact information gets placed\u00a0into the sales funnel where a process begins. The names\u00a0show up on a list and a salesperson will be assigned to contact these individuals. This initial contact usually follows prescribed workflow defined by the particular company.<\/p>\n

Conversica aims to automate this part of the sales task, but to do it in a natural feeling way. \u201cYou don\u2019t see it as an AI assistant. You see it as normal interaction,\u201d Terry said. The job of the assistant is to answer the questions it\u2019s capable of answering, and then\u00a0eventually get the contact\u00a0on the phone with a person.<\/p>\n

It does this using several forms of artificial intelligence. It starts with natural language process (NLP), which allows the assistant to \u201cread\u201d a response. The first step is to understand the meaning behind each interaction with the potential customer.<\/p>\n

Next comes the inference engine, which allows the assistant to determine precisely what the customer is\u00a0asking beyond pure keyword search. The idea is to understand the content and the sentiment behind the content. For example, the person\u00a0might not be ready to buy right now, so they get put on\u00a0a \u201cnurture\u201d list\u00a0for later contact.<\/p>\n

Finally, it uses natural language generation to craft a meaningful reply to the email based on the customer\u2019s response. \u201cThere\u2019s quite a lot of technology under the hood. It\u2019s a dramatically different experience from an auto-responder,\u201d Terry\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Over 1000 companies are using the sales assistant\u00a0software, but it also has plans to apply that same artificial intelligence technology to other parts of the company including initial customer service contact. These products are currently in various stages of development.<\/p>\n

Conversica\u00a0currently has 140 employees, and an impressive $18 million in annually recurring revenue, according to Terry.<\/p>\n

With the new money, the company plans to\u00a0expand the sales and marketing groups, as you might expect, but also build additional integrations with other software packages, expand partnerships \u2014 and eventually, perhaps in 2018, undertake global expansion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: FeelPic\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/nygnaMrOMSk\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often\u00a0responding with an\u00a0introductory\u00a0email. Conversica has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-2247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t