Josh Feast's Cogito Provides Technology To Bring Charm Back To Customer Service

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape:  Josh Feast, Cofounder and CEO, Cogito

The Customer Service industry is big business, representing a $84.7 billion global market by 2020, according to Radiant Insights. Yet most consumers today still view customer service as a point of frustration when engaging with companies. Often the interaction is highly ....

emotionally charged, creating an interaction most customer service representatives find challenging to manage. One company, Boston-based Cogito, is working to change all of that.

Cogito is an artificial intelligence software platform based on behavioral science born of years of research at MIT’s Human Dynamic Lab and initially funded by DARPA to bring it commercial use.

“We help people be more charming in conversation, which is something you don't often think of technology being able to do. We've figured out how to measure how well a conversation between humans is going and we're able to guide the participants on how they can adjust the way that they're speaking to get a better outcome from that conversation,” says cofounder and CEO, Josh Feast.

The organizations Cogito works with have between 20 and 40 percent of their operating costs invested in customer service, and many of their clients including Humana, Zurich and CareFirst have between 10,000 to 40,000 employees on the front-lines making calls and possibly turning people off from their services or products.

“We're helping them provide a better experience for their customers when they call in. Our solution is helping customer service professionals better manage difficult, emotional customers and also helping them achieve higher job satisfaction, showing them how the work they're doing is meaningful because of the impact they're having on the customer. For the customers (which is most of us), we all get a much more pleasant conversation when we call into the service line of a large company,” says Feast

Customer service representatives get phone calls routed to them from the telephony system. Cogito analyzes calls as they're happening and delivers real-time recommendations to the service professionals as they're speaking on the phone. “It's like a big, high-performance, computing AI system. We can integrate into a CRM system or deploy the application stand-alone; customer service reps get notifications when they need to change something about the way they're speaking. As they take these recommendations they come across as more confident, more empathic, calmer, and more compassionate.”