It's not every day that large competitors become investors in the same company. This week, however, one CRM company attracted funding in a Series C round from four of the biggest: Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and Comcast.!
The venture capital arms of those tech giants - as well as a few other well-known VC investors like Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, plowed $27 million into Tact.ai, bringing the start-up's total amount of capital raised to $53 million, according to this report on TechCrunch.
What's so special about Tact.ai? Two words: voice recognition. The company's technology uses artificial intelligence to solve a CRM headache that many of my clients consistently complain about: getting their sales people to use the system!With voice-enabled technology, sales people can talk to their devices in the field and ask their CRM systems everything from sales history and email communications about a customer to providing more information about products, orders and preferences while on the go, in their car or just sitting in a conference room.
Tact.ai is designed to be a sales person's personal assistant who's on call 24/7. It automatically pushes deal and customer insights to the rep's device and recommends the best next actions. It's powerful voice features is capable of quickly switching conversations and knowing a user's personal preferences as well as promising to let sales people carry on conversations and figure out solutions with it that aren't necessarily linear or set to a specific script. And it will ultimately sync with powerful CRM systems provide by Microsoft and Salesforce while running on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services.
It’s no secret that Amazon, Microsoft and other large tech companies are investing heavily in voice automation technologies. Most of the attention, however, has been focused on consumer driven devices powered by technologies like Alexa and Cortana.
But, behind the scenes, big steps are being taken to use this technology to help companies better automate their sales and customer service processes. “Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,” Paul Bernard, the Director of Amazon’s Alexa Fund said in the TechCrunch report. Amazon is rapidly investing in applications that will run on its Alexa for Business platform.
CRM is all about managing relationships with people – customers, prospects, partners and suppliers, which makes it the natural next step for voice-automated technologies like the ones provided by Tact.ai and others in the space. These applications, as they mature, will help sales and service people better use their CRM systems to conversationally complete tasks, manage deals, interact with customers and collaborate with others in their company.