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Just about six months after Mattersight took in $6 million, the behavioral analytics software company has closed another $12 million round. The need for all this capital? Mattersight has to put in upfront investment for their solution, which pairs callers with call center reps based on personalities, because they let companies use it for free during a trial period. Then, they hook the companies (which are historically Fortune 500s) with a subscription SaaS model.
At about this time last year, Mattersight had brought on about five companies to try out the Predictive Behavioral Routing solution with their call centers. Since then, Mattersight has had over 60 companies try it out, all of which “have shown immediate and compelling results,” EVP of products and customer operations David Gustafson said.
“We are seeing benefits that range anywhere from 7 percent better to 24 percent better as far as higher sales and also with reduction in cost (shorter, more efficient calls),” Gustafson said. “So it’s working, we just need to go faster and get more and more customers signed up.”
The data behind Mattersight's call center solutions
As Mattersight uses this capital to get more companies signed up, and hooked on, their solution, they are collecting an insane amount of data on companies’ interactions with customers. Companies can leverage this data when training and coaching employees using Mattersight’s original solution.
“We have a robust Performance Management Application, which was actually our first solution for companies, to help them better handle different types of calls,” Gustafson said. “We built a $35 million a year business doing that until we realized that it’s a lot easier to connect people based on their inherent strengths - instead of working on changing them.”
So now Mattersight has pivoted itself from a marketing standpoint with Predictive Behavioral Routing as the lead-in solution: “That’s how we go to market now - and we prove ourselves in an easy, trail mode.”
The biggest reason behind the marketing shift was that the Predictive Behavioral Routing solution has immediate benefits: companies see their call centers improve in efficiency right away. With the original Performance Management Application solution, companies have to wait to coach employees and for their behavior to change before seeing results.
“We had companies that we were selling our performance solution to and then we had to pivot and sell our predictive solution,” Gustafson said. “It did take a little while to get the message out, to really hone our pitch and to figure out a way to easily engage with customers. But the reason we transitioned to this model was because it was easier for our customers.”
Mattersight's future: using personality data to inform other interactions
Down the line, Mattersight will likely go through even more marketing shifts as it morphs into a company that applies Big Data to personality-based interactions (aka all personal and business interactions). That’s a long way away from the company Mattersight was when it started off as a startup incubated within eLoyalty, a public consulting company. But since 2006, Mattersight has been focused on giving fresh analytics solutions to enterprises.
“What we’ve found out is how much personality matters,” Gustafson said. We look at a caller calling in, we see how different the interaction is when they interact with the agent on a personal level. We don’t plan to be a routing or a call center company: what we find extremely compelling is how much personality affects interactions on a daily basis and how our insights could be expanded to other places and capabilities.”
