Spokn AI Success Intelligence
Solution for deeper understanding of sales rep's successes and failures, delivered in 5 months and securing 100+ sales agents seats
About
Client: MaxContact, a contact center software company serving businesses with contact center teams. Previous episode: On how I stopped worrying and embraced generative AI.
I led UX strategy, research synthesis, and design execution, from early concepts to developer handoff, collaborated closely with engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders.
Timeline
5 months
My Role
Product designer
Team
- 1 designer
- Product owner
- Development team
Results
- • 1st iteration finished in 3 months, released in production in 5 months
- • 100+ licences signed up
The Challenge
Success Intelligence is a tool to help managers understand how sales reps handle objections and where they need support.
Sales manager's challenges:
- Understand customer objections and effective handling strategies,
- Measure sales agent performance,
- Improve training, support, and job satisfaction in contact centres.
The Approach
After a design sprint involving the whole team, we found the initial solution ideas.
Discover
In the tight timeline, we used findings from prior custdev interviews and client feedback on the first release of Spokn AI.
What stood out:
- Outbound sales drive revenue — making them the key focus in performance optimization.
- Objection handling is a blind spot — managers knew it mattered, but lacked tools to track and coach it effectively.
- Agents often get blamed for low success rates, without enough context to understand systemic issues like pricing, targeting, or product-market fit.
Define
Based on the insights, we identified the main user problems:
- It’s hard to locate the most important parts of a call.
- Coaching lacks precision—managers don’t know exactly where reps struggle or succeed
- There’s no overview of objection trends—so training is often reactive, not proactive
Develop
We broke the product down into three clear increments:
- Objection Mapping – Define and track common objection themes
- Performance Analytics – Show how agents handle these objections
- AI Insights – Surface patterns and guidance based on deeper transcript analysis
The problems we faced:
- Some “successful” calls didn’t align with the patterns in transcript data—sales charisma is hard to measure
- Legal/privacy constraints meant we had to train our own custom LLMs, slowing things down
- Manual mapping of objections from real transcripts was time-consuming but necessary
Deliver
We designed a toolset that helps contact center managers understand what’s going wrong, who needs support and why. The solution had four main components:
- Dashboard switching focus from agents to objections;
- Interaction details highlighting the objections there;
- and Spokn AI Spotlight – providing AI insights based on the data.
The Solution
Dashboard: objections frequency vs agent performance
The dashboard provides two ways of looking at the data depending on the current focus of the manager:
Equal attention to agents, teams, campaigns and objections themselves lead to horizontal information structure with access to details overlay for each entity.
Objections details
Objection details overlay provides a view on its frequency and the efforts in handling them.
Interaction details
Objections are highlighted in the interaction analysis: the user can jump right to them, find them in the transcript and examine its details.
AI insights — Spokn AI Spotlight
The final, and the most fun part of the service was supposed to be AI insights page based on patterns the model finds in the conversations data.
This is what we wanted to look like in the end: general insights combined with on-demand analysis of very detailed requests and questions based on analytics of backend data and transcripts content.
The Impact
We shipped the pilot version in 3 months and rolled out the full release in 5. Over 100 licenses were signed early on, and the customers reported immediate value from the transcription and summarization features—even before full-scale rollout of the Success Intelligence modules.
“As a business, we are very committed to Al and the value it brings. We've found a lot of use in Spokn Al, the speech transcription and summarisation feature has been a massive help.”— Call centre manager of one of the customers
While I didn’t stay to support the development stage, I’m proud of the foundation we built. The early impact validated our shift in direction—from raw transcript analytics to targeted sales support.
“Nastya's ability to balance creativity with practical constraints, along with her proactive engagement across teams, was instrumental in the project's success. (...) I highly recommend Nastya for any team looking to advance their product offerings. Her expertise, initiative, and collaborative spirit make her an asset in any fast-paced environment.”— Drew Naylor, Product Manager at MaxContact
Reflection
This project pushed me to adapt quickly, navigate ambiguity, and align technical possibilities with real user needs.