A world-first, culture-centric tool to help build positive workplace change and create a psychologically safe environment: Call Journey’s latest AI solution, Worklife Hero

“Our interaction experts have combined the best in AI, NLP, and Acoustic Emotional AI to create our industry-leading analytics ecosystems.”

Call Journey is a Melbourne-based innovative tech startup that uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze phone and text-based conversations. It operates across North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

The company’s mission is to deliver unparalleled insights via Interaction AI to help organizations understand their customers and employees better, so that they can do better.

The Call Journey team of passionate conversation experts brings together Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create an industry-leading conversation analytics ecosystem. Using this technology to harness the power of voice data, Call Journey is helping organizations find answers to some of their biggest challenges by delivering insights that directly impact customer experience, business performance, risk management and compliance.

The company was incorporated in 2009.

The Silicon Review reached out to Call Journey headquarters and spoke to Paul Humphrey, CEO and co-founder of Call Journey. Here’s what he said.

Interview Highlights

Q. What inspired the creation of Call Journey? And how did the company continue to adapt over the years?

Call Journey was inspired by the experiences of myself and my co-founder across many years in business – specifically, from needing to understand high-value insights from conversations. Initially, contact centers were our main target for sourcing better information. We knew there was a huge gap in the market with manual call listening and processing – many contact centers were struggling to collect and analyze the right insights. They had vast quantities of data and were only able to process a tiny fraction of it.

As a result, we designed our conversation ecosystem to capture 100 percent of those conversations and automate the majority of that quality assurance, allowing leaders to spend more time coaching.

Those insights adapted over time to extend beyond quality assurance insights to areas like customer experience insights, emotion and sentiment analytics, interaction effectiveness, and problem area diagnosis. Our customers now additionally do predictive NPS, predictive next best offer, and predictive behavior (like fraud).

With the pandemic having unleashed huge change in workplace behaviors and environments, and significant volumes of interactions through Unified Communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, we saw a new but adjacent need to analyze an emerging, expansive cohort of conversations — employee meetings/interactions.

Organizations are now facing challenges like ‘The Great Resignation’ (or ‘Realignment’ – whichever you read!), hybrid work/gig economy and new ways of working, and a continued deep focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. With those key global organizational challenges in mind, and with the accelerating response to the growing emphasis on employee engagement and psychological safety, we are expanding our product suite to include a virtual meeting companion tool to help professional development and cultural change for employees.

The product, Worklife Hero, delivers privacy-protected insights to employees around critical soft skills like active listening and inclusive communication and insights such as wellbeing indicators. These insights are then rolled up, anonymized, and delivered to company leaders trying to identify pain points and trends in their culture and work design.

Q. What can you tell us about your speech experts and how do they create the best-of-breed speech analytics ecosystem in the market?                                                           

Our interaction experts have combined the best in AI, NLP, and Acoustic Emotional AI to create our industry-leading analytics ecosystems. Our rule engines are based on best practices in people science, whether that’s from a customer service lens or a people and culture lens.

We are a ‘customer obsessed’ company; we put the user experience front and center. For example, we don’t gatekeep our insights and keep them purely within our ecosystem; we allow our customers to integrate with their BI or analytics system of choice.

We also believe that the best intelligence combines both artificial and human input. Call Journey augments human insight and creates 100 percent coverage and scoring to eliminate human bias and error as well as capturing subtle elements like tone, content, silence, and pitch to create a true, omni-dimensional understanding of the customer.

Q. How does this speech analytics ecosystem help organizations address some of their biggest challenges, and deliver insights that directly impact EX, business performance, and compliance?

Currently, organizations are facing huge employee headwinds, with the re-imagined workplace and hybrid working/the gig economy at the forefront. There are internal and external demands on equality, culture, diversity, and inclusion, and the need to underpin these environments with a psychologically safe workplace. All this working virtually blindfolded with no truly effective way of really understanding the actual lived experience of their employees.

Enter Worklife Hero, the new best friend of employees and employers alike. Someone recently told us that our Worklife Hero solution for employees was akin to Fitbit for meeting communication.

In employee experience settings, our Worklife Hero tool helps companies build, instill or shift their culture through lived behavioral change. We know that companies can use our tool to create healthier, more psychologically safe cultures, and increase retention, productivity, and engagement as a result. Customers, partners, and significant market research tells us loud and clear that nurturing a great employee experience will be the number one strategic priority for many companies moving forward.

Q. What strategies are in place to encourage innovation in your company?

A culture of psychological safety! We want our team to be able to collaborate fearlessly, bring ideas to the table, and explore what’s possible in the world of speech analytics. We look to drive a culture where every person in the company is valued, regardless of title.

We have been using our Worklife Hero tool in team meetings, which has expanded our individual and collective awareness of the way we interact and work and how we can improve that. This includes conversational habits like active listening, speaking clearly and confidently, being action-oriented, and being an inclusive speaker.

Q. How skilled is the Call Journey team of experts? And how do they bring value to the company?

We have a team of data scientists, tech experts, operational experts, and marketing superstars based all around the world. We value their skills and proficiencies, but we value their collaboration and culture fit even more. It’s important to us that everybody can bring their ‘best selves’ to work and contribute to that inclusive, collaborative culture. By having the right people on the team skills-wise and pursuing the right partnerships, we can pretty quickly mobilize ideas into tangible features if the timing is right.

Additionally, we are engaging with a global, thought-leadership-based advisory panel of experts in areas like psychological safety, DE&I, culture, and mental health for our Worklife Hero solution.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?

A multinational medical company decided to use our CX solution to augment their human-intelligence QA process with artificial intelligence to significantly increase the volume and quality of call analysis. After using our ecosystem, team leaders who previously spent 80 percent of their time monitoring were then able to use 80 percent of their time coaching. Script adherence increased from 23 to 96 percent.

While our Worklife Hero product is only in its early stages, we are seeing powerful shifts in workplace culture and employee experience, with a flow-on impact on retention and productivity. We hope to make the ‘immeasurable,’ measurable.

Q. What do you think are the biggest challenges your industry will face in the next five years? And how do you plan to counter those challenges?

Like most industries, ‘The Great Resignation/Realignment’ and adapting current systems to hybrid work. Hybrid or even fully remote is the new normal! We were almost entirely remote even prior to the pandemic, but we hope to help other organizations adapt to the Future of Work by allowing them to leverage virtual tools to measure and influence culture for the better.

I think that the appetite for seamless tech isn’t going anywhere soon. Fast and seamless tech adoption and holistic data sets will become MVP expectations. We are constantly on the lookout for tech partners to help us deliver a flexible, agnostic experience for our customers.

Q. Is there anything else you want us to highlight that we might have missed?

The future of work! Gartner has predicted that by 2025, 75 percent of workplace conversations will be recorded and analyzed. Others have predicted that the tools we use to engage and work remotely will be the same tools we use to analyze employee experience.

We are committed to the early adoption of technological change to support these environmental shifts and give employees more of an active say in building the cultures they want to be a part of. We continue to commit to being data-agnostic, and helping organizations integrate the various data sets they work with. No gatekeeping.

Paul Humphrey | CEO & Co-Founder

For the past 30 years, Paul Humphrey has been helping businesses find solutions to business pains related to workforce optimization, sales processes, and, lately, growing data requirements. 

Paul has worked for the largest telecommunication, insurance, and financial companies in Australia, heading teams of up to 8,000 employees in a call center environment. Across his career, he has both led and consulted on significant transformation programs. 

Eight years ago, he co-founded Call Journey. Since then, he transformed the company into an official partner of the largest market players and an integral part of the speech analytics landscape.

Paul is a recognized thought leader in data-driven revenue protection and growth, customer experience, and operational efficiency. He is a regular presenter at global service and sales-thought-leadership conferences and has a passion for execution and opportunity realization.

His passion for employee wellbeing and psychological safety is a match made in heaven for Call Journey’s new employee well-being tool, Worklife Hero.

“We have been using our Worklife Hero tool in team meetings, which has expanded our individual and collective awareness of the way we interact and work and how we can improve that. This includes conversational habits like active listening, speaking clearly and confidently, being action-oriented, and being an inclusive speaker.”

“In employee experience settings, our Worklife Hero tool helps companies build, instill or shift their culture through lived behavioral change.”