Call center employees don’t have an easy job; they are constantly interacting with already-frustrated customers while working to meet strict performance metrics. Durham entrepreneur Charith Wickrema wanted to help build emotional resilience among these employees and ultimately founded Focus Cubes: a tech solution combining mindfulness techniques and cognitive behavioral therapy to improve outcomes.
Call center employees experience high levels of burnout, and turnover rates average 50%. While conducting customer discovery, Wickrema found that most employees in this space struggle with tough conversations, wherein they can be the victims of verbal attacks. Wickrema said customers may call customer service already angry and then take out their frustration on the employee on the phone.
“Typically, even within the first hour of work, it’s not uncommon for some of the agents to hear things like, ‘you suck,’ ‘you’re a horrible person,’” Wickrema said.
Focus Cubes, sold in a B2B model, is a program that provides real-time interventions to call center employees. The program assesses the user’s emotions based on biometrics—analyzing a user’s typing or speech patterns, for example. Based on the results, Focus Cubes will then send the user micro-interventions to improve their mood, such as suggestions of deep breaths or posture adjustment. These short suggestions pop up on the user’s screen, offering real-time solutions to stress or anger that take less than two minutes to act upon.
When call center agents are calmer and less stressed, Wickrema said the quality of their customer service improves. He noted that research has also shown that customers are likely to leave a brand if they have a poor customer service experience, which in turn means that improving outcomes at call centers is helpful for both the employees and the company as a whole.
In addition to mitigating stress as it occurs, Focus Cubes also aims to help get employees in a calmer mental state before they even pick up the phone, Wickrema said.
Through its biometric analyses, Focus Cubes aggregates data and can get to know an individual user and recognize patterns.
For example, with audio detection, the technology can identify patterns with a person’s voice inflection or breathing to detect what situations make that user stressed or anxious. Combining various data points, such as typing analysis or heart rate, will improve the accuracy of the micro-interventions.
Typically, call centers employees receive 10-to-15 calls per hour. Due to the repetitive nature of this work, Wickrema said the employees are under “continuous stress cycles,” which made this an attractive market for Focus Cubes. The calls are also highly monitored, which allows Wickrema and his team to more easily test the efficacy of their product.
The product will be sold at 2% of a company’s attrition rate, which is measured by the costs of hiring and training new employees when previous ones leave. Wickrema estimates this will come out to about $1000 per employee.
Focus Cubes will be “employee-centric,” and Wickrema said he wants to ensure that employees feel safe and supported using the program.
Wickrema is now the CEO of the startup he founded, and he has a clinical therapist and AI specialist on his team to help with product development. After launching in September 2024, the team is currently working on a prototype, with Wickrema aiming to pilot the product by April.
This past December, Wickrema was part of the inaugural cohort in the FCAT Fellowship, wherein early-stage founders with disruptive technologies can enjoy 10 weeks of resource and growth support. (GrepBeat has also written about Wickrema’s fellow cohort members Scale Social AI, Celestic, Baby Bumps, Deliveri, Elroi, Ver Coaching, and IX Studio.)
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Startup: Focus Cubes
Founder: Charith Wickrema (CEO)
Founded: 2024
Team size: 1 (with advisors)
Location: Durham, NC
Website: www.focuscubes.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Beyond call centers, Wickrema wants to bring Focus Cubes to other types of employees. For example, this mindfulness training could help a first-time manager when they have to lay off their first employee, or assist someone in a conflict with a colleague.
After many years working in the large enterprise sector, Wickrema was looking for a way to bring mindfulness into the corporate world. He saw that his coworkers were under high levels of stress, leading to burnout from strict deadlines, interpersonal conflict, or other measures. He said a lot of people were not bringing their complete selves to work.
Focus Cubes offers easy, accessible ways to feel good, he said.
Wickrema began his personal mindfulness journey when he was 19, after realizing he had “an inner mystery that needed unraveling.” He regularly practices mediation and has attended various retreats all over the world, which was the inspiration for starting Focus Cubes.
“To have a really good life, it really depends on how you feel,” Wickrema said.
