Voyc won the internationally acclaimed 2021 Blue Tulip Award hosted by Accenture in the Netherlands in the Finance & Prosperity category last week.
Voyc is a speech analytics quality management solution for contact centres that helps improve compliance, accelerate and optimise the handling of complaints, identify and protect vulnerable customers, and ultimately bridge trust between financial services companies and their customers.
Throughout the three-month competition, Accenture welcomed 50 promising innovations in the Finance & Prosperity category. This year, the key theme was aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals to eliminate poverty, provide decent work and increase economic growth.
Accenture and its partners sought to identify the most promising innovations among the top European start-ups. The participants went through gruelling rounds where they presented to partners, media, industry experts, and other fellow innovators.
During the final round of the competition, a jury member Rob Klomps, who is the Industry CTO Financial Services EMEA at Salesforce, noted that all the finalists in the Finance & Prosperity category have great products, good organisations and sound strategies. However, the jury was convinced that Voyc stood out from the others with their speech analytics software: “The winner is aligning new technology with the values of their company to a great extent.”
By using Conversation Intelligence and Compliance Monitoring AI-powered software, Voyc helps firms in the financial services industry to automatically identify and react to interactions of regulatory importance at their contact centres, such as complaints and vulnerable customers.
“We’re honoured and humbled to be selected as the best company among 50 great innovators nominated from all over Europe, ” says Matthew Westaway, co-founder and CEO at Voyc. “We are delighted to be recognised for our mission to empower contact centres to handle every interaction with consistency and care.”
“My partner and I developed Voyc to introduce contact centre software that would bridge trust between financial services companies and their customers,” notes Lethabo Motsoaledi, co-founder and CTO at Voyc.
“When we think about vulnerable customers we often imagine someone with cognitive impairment or other serious health problems. However, each of us could find ourselves in a position of vulnerability at some point in our lives. Suppose you had a car accident, or you’ve been furloughed and cannot pay your monthly premium to the bank. As a company, you want every such customer to be treated fairly, and feel that they can trust your business.”
“If customers do not have a good experience with the contact centre that does not reflect well on the company. Then you can trust that Voyc will be there to pick up on the experience and help the company to rectify it by flagging it with them. The company can then return the call and address any concerns to re-establish trust.”
Motsoaledi represented Voyc at Blue Tulip Awards from the Top 50 stage, down to Top 20, Top 5 and eventually to win the competition.
“We’re delighted to receive this important award for tech start-ups in Europe. This award will allow us to scale our efforts as we continue on our journey to empower contact centres to handle every interaction with consistency and care,” concludes Westaway.
About Voyc
It all started in 2015, when Voyc’s co-founders, Matthew Westaway and Lethabo Motsoaledi, then UCT (University of Cape Town) Engineering Graduates, were sharing grievances about poor interactions they have had with the contact centres of retailers. They concluded that their poor experiences were due to a common trait that many large companies seem to have – they simply don’t seem to care about their customers.
They decided to start a User Experience agency to help companies understand their customers better. While running this agency, they encountered the pain of manually listening to and analysing recorded interviews. They both thought to themselves that surely a solution that automatically analyses conversations and highlights key themes should exist. Failing to find anything, they created the first version of Voyc for themselves – a solution to analyse conversations automatically. After making it into the prestigious Techstars SAP.iO accelerator in Berlin, they were exposed to the world of contact centres, and their perception of customer service changed. They realised that contact centre professionals do, in fact, care about their customers. They just don’t have enough time and capacity to manage every interaction consistently.
Furthermore, the contact centres’ quality assurance processes designed to deliver insights and improve operations were manual and inefficient. These involved listening to randomly sampled calls and checking for compliance using Excel scoresheets.
Westaway and Motsoaledi realised that the technology they were building could give contact centres the capacity to monitor 100% of their calls.
Fast forward to today, Voyc supports dozens of contact centres to identify the customers in need of further assistance and agents in need of further training.
The Voyc team is dedicated to bridging the trust gap between companies and their customers by empowering contact centres to handle every single interaction with consistency and care.
Voyc has set a goal to monitor the calls of 200 million end customers and make sure that they feel ‘cared for’ whenever engaging with a company that runs Voyc in their contact centre.
