Operata is a performance monitoring and assurance solution for organisations using contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) technology. It draws on a range of data sources to pinpoint call quality issues and speed up the path to problem resolution.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into Operata, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products. There are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see how we invest here.

Markets with tailwinds

The economic efficiencies around shared services are a no-brainer, so the as-a-service movement has extended to contact centres. Even though only 10% of organisations have migrated from legacy on-premise solutions to the contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) model, the market size is already US$24BN. The market is well-established, but still forecast to grow at a 26% CAGR, with the remote-work movement accelerating this trend.

The organisations that made this move prior to the COVID-19 outbreak were well positioned for their agents to work from home. Those that didn't have been rushing to stand up a remote contact centre for the past twelve months. With the likes of NICE InContact, AWS Connect and Genesys taking the bulk of market share, a distribution platform for supporting products is emerging.

Voice technology is rapidly improving, but the quality of speech and voice is more critical than ever. Voice quality directly impacts customer satisfaction, handling times (and therefore costs) for the organisation and even agent mental health. Voice is also no longer just a human to human channel. Bots, assistants, NLP and biometrics are all reliant on voice quality for performance, further complicating the voice infrastructure stack.

A complex infrastructure stack creates a product opportunity

Whilst the CCaaS offerings in the market are designed as simple tools, the implementation of a CCaaS system is both complex and mission-critical. To stand up a contact centre requires proven performance - scalability, quality, and accuracy all need to be tested and evidenced to make a transition. Data resides in silos throughout the org and it's hard to surface issues in the CCaaS setup without observability - performance issues can be attributed not only to the CCaaS provider, but to the supporting third-party services and often to the agents themselves.

Today, businesses have few options but to manually test the technical and functional requirements of their various contact centre systems, requiring testers to call their business phone systems and engage in web chat or other outreach channels to identify defects, disruptions, or disconnections in their experiences. The tools used to monitor performance today in modern cloud communications are ineffective at measuring customer experience quality and providing the level of detail needed to focus improvement and optimise performance.

Products that change the game

Operata provides performance monitoring and experience management for CCaaS. The product observes and reports on the factors impacting call quality, from a network outage to an agent headset issue. This enables two things:

1. get CCaaS environments stood up quickly with minimal risk and
2. ensure optimal ongoing voice quality for agents and customers.

The product demonstrates an obvious and real-time ROI to the organisation, because fewer issues and better call quality means service agents can spend their time resolving customer issues.