Plato Is Listening To Your Calls
Plato automates quality assurance in call centers.
By Minna Wang
Utah is a magnet for call centers. Last year, our state had 42,400 customer service representatives and 4,270 telemarketers. That’s more than the population of Noordoostpolder, more than the number of deaf children in the UK, and more than double the number of square feet in the Hong Kong China LDS Temple. We’re glad to be able to put that figure into perspective for you.
Regardless of whether or not we’re proud of our telemarketing prowess, the industry is here to stay. Marriott Hotels, Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines, and JetBlue Airways all have reservation call centers here, which Wikipedia posits is due to our easily understood and pleasant mild western accents. And it’s because of this promising future that Plato, the artificial intelligence for call centers, is coming onto the scene.
“Plato automates quality assurance in call centers,” says founder Curtis Brown. “Call centers are doing this manually right now. They have a certain set of criteria that they’re grading calls on, and a group of employees will score a fraction of every month’s calls on a spreadsheet. Essentially, we’re training our system with machine learning modules to do what those employees are doing. Our software will actually do the scoring for the company for 100% of their calls.”
The idea for the company came from Curtis’ own frustrations with the system. Call centers offer bonuses or raises to employees based on the quality of their calls. But when only a small selection of every employee’s calls are being graded, that means that great agents can get bad scores and vice versa.
“At the first call center I worked at, I found out that one of the calls they graded me on wasn’t up to the standard. But if they would’ve listened to a few more, they would’ve known that the majority of my calls were higher quality,” says Curtis. “Another call center I talked to said they weren’t able to listen to enough calls to train their employees and ensure that they’d be compliant with all the legal requirements.”
Plato’s technical team is an engineering company with years of experience in the natural language processing and speech recognition space, and a few of Utah’s most well-known call centers have signed up to be beta testers. Because of the company’s quick traction, the student-run venture fund Campus Founders Fund recently invested in Plato.
“We decided to invest in Plato because we were impressed with the partnerships that they have made and the quality of the product that they are building,” says Ashlee Gerlach, a partner at CFF. “For a very new company, Plato has already experienced a large amount of traction and we feel that Plato has potential to be a major player in a large upcoming market.”
Curtis’ insights into the industry have allowed him to build the product quickly. But the startup considers itself more than a call center technology company.
“I think in the long run, we’re in the artificial intelligence space,” Curtis says. “At some point, there won’t be anything in your life that isn’t affected by AI. There’s going to be a lot of jobs that’ll be replaced by machines in the future. Artificial intelligence is going to change the world as it becomes more usable and finally hits exponential growth.”
Published 5/6/2016
