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In a span of 24 hours, an average call centre gets around one lakh customer calls, including complaints, cross-sells, upsells, and general enquiries. Now, in order to draw an analysis, a small team of managers choose a few random calls out of one lakh to provide compliance and quality feedback.

As a result, 99.9 percent of the sample is missed and the analysis is half cooked or completely misinformed, in some cases.

This is where technology intervention comes in and brings to the fore an opportunity to automate the entire process, making it more efficient. Chandigarh-based SaaS startup Enthu.ai is disrupting this traditional space with its conversation intelligence software that leverages the power of AI to help call centres improve their agent performances and compliance to enhance customer experience. 

Founded in August 2020 by Tushar Jain, Enthu.ai helps call centres analyse 100 percent of call interactions, extract actionable sentiment and interaction insights, and streamline workflows. The agents can, thus, be monitored, evaluated, and coached to perform better with the help of technology. 

How it works?

The entire idea of Enthu.ai is to help managers gain full visibility into their customer service operations and run coaching for its agents.  

“A single platform makes it easier for call centres to evaluate how the entire customer care centre is working and what they need to do to operate efficiently,” Tushar says.   

The founder explains the functioning of the product with an interesting example. 

Say a company plans to run a pitch for a Diwali discount and asks agents to make relevant calls across target customers. At the end of the day, the call centre manager would want to evaluate if the pitching was done right by his team and evaluate their performance. 

Now, instead of listening to random recorded calls, he could define the manual script (which is used for reference by agents) in the Enthu.ai software, which will process each and every call and present a detailed report or ‘conversation analysis’.  

“From customers’ reaction to evaluating if the agents adhered to the script given, the manager can evaluate everything to further improve, experiment, and coach,” says Tushar.  

For instance, the software could analyse the discussion over the competitors during the calls and how the agent handled the same. This way, the manager can modify the scripts, create checks and parameters through which agents can run a conversation or pitch in a better manner. 

“We are trying to reduce the load on managers and give them 100 percent call coverage. Even in the best case scenario, a manager is able to listen to six calls per month which is extremely limited to understand the compliance or an agent’s performance,” Tushar says.  

Besides call coverage, the AI-powered Conversation Intelligence has features like script compliance, daily/monthly/weekly dashboards of agent performance, end-to-end agent evaluation capabilities, call playbacks, custom QA evaluation forms and custom script creation. 

The ideation

Before going live with Enthu.ai, Tushar successfully ran a SaaS-based Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) optimisation product called OnPage Champ. The idea for his second venture cropped up when the founder was looking to scale up his team. 

“I had no clue how my team was pitching or what responses they were getting from customers over calls. Giving them the right coaching was a big challenge. I had a calling software, but it was tedious to manually fetch recordings from it, pick random samples, and analyse,” Tushar says.  

On a look out for a solution, the founder realised that the majority of the softwares in the market were built for enterprises and unaffordable for smaller businesses.

“I couldn’t find any product which was SMB friendly or open to the market. There was an opportunity,” he says. 

The team launched the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 45 days and started speaking with customers. Tushar already had a tech team at place and the learning from the first venture came handy. “This was one of the major reasons why we were able to launch and scale Enthu.ai so quickly,” says Tushar.

The in-house software was launched in August 2020 with the help of third party APIs and a cloud-based server.

In January 2021, the founder closed down his first venture and shifted the team to focus on Enthu-ai, which was joined by its co-founder Vishal Verma, Head of Engineering. 

Business outlook

The startup has around 15 clients from North America, Philippines, Australia, and India. 

“We are catering to call centres with a team size of as low as 10 agents to a strength of 100,” he says. 

The early-stage startup is focussed on building revenue and expanding its reach across the said markets. 

“Since the last three months, we have been doubling our revenue and seeing good traction across territories. We are close to breakeven and will be able to make our first rupee in next three to four months,” says the founder.  

The SaaS product follows the subscription-based pricing model where the customers pay on a monthly/yearly basis for online software use. The startup also does custom pricing as per the requirements and team size. 

“We have been able to achieve our aim of providing an affordable product. Our prices are 1/3rd of what the competitors charge,” says Tushar. 

The startup recently raised an early stage round of $200,000 from Appitsimple, better known for its digital products CallHippo and SoftwareSuggest. 

“We are in the process of raising an internal funding round through friends and family and will soon go for a pre-seed of Rs 4-5 crore,” he says.  

Market potential & future

The startup will focus on team building, product development, sales, and growth for the next six months. 

“We plan to grow our team to 25 members, mostly around outreach and engineering, by the end of 2021. We hope to grow our revenue by 7X by the end of the year,” says Tushar. 

Enthu.ai faces competition from global and domestic players like Observe.ai (India), Gong (US-based Unicorn), Chorus.ai (India), Wingman (India), and Fireflies.ai (US). 

“A US call centre market is of about $400 billion in which conversation intelligence holds just $2 billion. The market opportunity is huge. The technology and use case is new. There have been incremental improvements in AI, ML and NLP in the last two years and hence the growth of the conversation intelligence market is over 100 percent,” the founder signs off. 

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