• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 14, 2023

Invoca, which builds artificial intelligence (AI) into its communication software for automated contact services, surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during its last fiscal year, which ends January 31, and begins February 1.

The company raised $83 million in Series F equity financing in 2022, to continue investments in AI technology, deeper solutions for the automotive industry, partnerships in the contact center, and a stronger market presence in the U.K.

“Businesses today are asking how they can apply artificial intelligence to help accelerate business,” says Gregg Johnson, CEO at Invoca. “We have always helped marketers make smarter investments to understand where to invest in digital marketing and drive the greatest return in the contact center. Given the macroeconomic environment every marketer needs data to defend their spend.”

Decisions that drive revenue are made together with an agent and contact center. To succeed in marketing, marketers must understand that where the business invests money drives where it makes money, Johnson says.

Invoca, founded in 2009, makes sense of unstructured conversational data, and began using AI around 2014. Around that time, marketers began pushing Invoca to help them better understand the outcomes of the conversations in the contact center, but they did not have a way to get the data on why consumers made decisions and took specific actions.

Developing products based on AI have paid off.

Johnson considers chatbots built on OpenAI ChatGPT technology to be a “continued progression of what’s possible” based on what Invoca does.

For example, in 2015 Invoca would record a conversation between a consumer and brand, and the technology transcribed the call. Invoca would give marketers searches based on keywords in an effort to understand when something occurred, such as a purchase.

Marketers needed a way to understand the conversation that is better than the strategy based on keywords. Technology used by Invoca now identifies consumer behaviors. Eventually, large language models made it much easier to build that type of technology into the workflows.

Invoca works with DirectTV, which implemented technology that identifies when consumers searching for a specific product land on one of its website pages and then call the company. The data from the search would be passed on to the DirectTV agent.

DirectTV began using Invoca’s Google Ads integration to track the phone leads driven by their paid-search campaigns and then used Invoca to inform Google’s smart bidding algorithm, which allowed them to scale their results and achieve a significant decrease in cost per acquisition. 

The digital journey is tied with the call into the customer-service center whether on a land line, computer line, mobile phone number, or “Bat phone,” he said. “These are new customers. Not existing.”

Invoca also continues to gain market share in automotive OEMs, dealership groups, repair and service franchises, and tire and parts retailers, helping them improve marketing and sales performance and provide frictionless customer experiences.

The company launched several products to support automotive brands in the last year, including Invoca for Multi-Location CX to measure and improve caller experiences and conversion rates at every dealership, service center, and franchise, pre-built quality assurance (QA) scorecards that use AI to automatically grade call handling at every location to ensure delivery of empathetic conversations, and ring group call routing to help locations reduce missed calls and convert more callers to appointments, store visits, and revenue.

The company recently onboarded new customer Subaru of America, Inc. Details of the agreement are confidential.

Johnson said about 95% of the company's customer base is in North America, but he plans to strengthen Invoca's position in other parts of the world.