Sharpen provides a cloud-based agent-first contact center solution with simple pricing and AI-powered in-line training, microlearning, and conversational coaching.
The company hails itself as the solution to these problems:
- Slow Release Cycles
- Expensive New versions
- Clunky/Confusing UI
- No/Limited API’s
- Expensive to maintain
- Monolithic code base
By providing:
- Fast Release Cycles
- Free upgrades
- Clean, efficient UX
- Open REST API’s
- No maintenance cost
- Microservices architecture
Pricing starts at $99/contact center agent/month.
In an in-person interview with Cameron Weeks, CEO (top right) and Bracken 
Fields, CTO (bottom left), they told me the call center market hadn’t been rearchitected for the cloud until they came along. The company has built a HIPAA and PCI compliant cloud in 14 regions with 100 ms replication time and AES 256 encryption. It works on Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud and customers can determine which of these to use if they like. This could come in handy as Walmart has encouraged customers to avoid Amazon AWS.
There is five nines uptime and an average 4.4 MOS score. In addition, a strong focus on training as mentioned at the start of this post – agents do not need to leave the application to be coached. An agent experience score is calculated as well as a transcript and call recording file.
Managers can highlight areas of the call and make suggestions such as a knowledgebase article, etc. The same interface can handle ongoing training such as for sexual harassment.
The company is based in Indianapolis, IN – the same city as Interactive Intelligence which is now Genesys. In a way, what Doctor Don Brown did at ININ by being first to integrate multiple channels has been replicated by Sharpen who is integrating agent training, cloud, security and AI.
Sharpen believes it is a great solution for solving customer satisfaction and agent turnover issues – two of the biggest problems plaguing contact center execs.
