OpenView Invests in Cogito, The Emotional Intelligence Platform

We’re excited to announce OpenView’s investment in Cogito, the leading provider of real time emotional intelligence in the enterprise. By applying behavioral science through artificial intelligence and machine learning, Cogito’s in-call guidance helps the world’s most successful enterprises improve sales results, deliver amazing customer experiences, and enhance quality of care.

While most machine intelligence research focused on communication is based on linguistic content, the ability to understand the meaning of a phrase, sentence, or paragraph based on the words it contains, these approaches leave more than 70% of the information in a verbal exchange on the cutting room floor. Vocal variety, made up of someone’s pitch, tone, and rate of speech, carries most of the message. So as traditional machine intelligence techniques are fueling the rise of chat bots, they fall short in understanding human conversation.

My favorite examples highlighting the importance of vocal variety are State Farm’s recent prime time TV spots juxtaposing conversations that embody the ups and downs of life using identical scripts. Take a moment to watch one here. It would be impossible to understand the meaning of those two conversations from just the transcript, all of the differentiating information is contained in vocal variety. That’s where Cogito comes in.

By analyzing conversations in real time and providing behavioral guidance to help phone professionals express empathy and better connect with customers, Cogito is consistently improving customer satisfaction by greater than 20% and agent engagement by more than 50% in a growing number of Fortune 500 healthcare, insurance, and financial call centers. In CEO and Co-Founder Joshua Feast’s words, Cogito allows “agents to be happier and more engaged in their jobs, customers to experience superior service, and companies to benefit from improved efficiency and increased loyalty.” In mine, it’s a win, win, win.

One of the most compelling aspects of Cogito’s platform is that it’s use case and language agnostic. While the nearly 14 million phone professionals engaging in half a billion conversations daily represent a multi-billion dollar opportunity for the company, Cogito’s emotional intelligence engine is not restricted to the call center — it has the potential to improve the quality of human conversation in many contexts.

This is completely aligned with OpenView’s mission of improving people’s working lives, and we’re honored to be working with the Cogito team in fulfilling theirs.