Nailing buyer expertise is hard. Each dialog, throughout each channel, counts. And whereas a lot in our lives has modified because the Sixties, the positioning of those buyer conversations has not: the contact heart. Contact facilities — with their 17M overworked, undertrained, and understaffed brokers globally — stay the hubs of buyer expertise. Brokers thus maintain the keys to unlock extra income, much less churn, and larger buyer satisfaction. To take action, there are one million issues an agent might say — however solely a particular few they ought to say.
Thankfully, we’re coming into a golden age of conversational AI and automation. The contact heart — with its handbook workflows and excessive quantity, repeatable processes — is the perfect software for it. Nevertheless, legacy on-premise methods are ill-equipped to ship the productiveness enhancements that contact facilities require for the digital age.
Enter Cresta: the Experience AI platform that turns any agent into “a 10x agent.” Cresta ingests dwell conversations and prompts brokers with real-time solutions, equivalent to objection responses, expectation setting, troubleshooting FAQs, and extra. From this, Cresta can baseline their fashions to high performers after which amplify greatest practices throughout the ground. The product additionally helps to automate agent workflows on the good second by opening the appropriate software program device, auto-filling ticket/lead entries, putting orders, and performing account validation. By nudging greatest practices and automating rote work, Cresta supercharges brokers to give attention to what actually issues: their interactions.
The ROI is rapid: increased conversion, higher NPS, and decrease dealing with instances. Better of all, as a substitute of ripping and changing infrastructure, Cresta is an open ecosystem that integrates and peacefully coexists with current contact heart software program; this makes its implementation quick and its coaching information wealthy.
From our first encounter with CEO and co-founder, Zayd Enam, it was clear he and the crew have been particular. Zayd moved to the U.S. from Pakistan on a scholarship at 17. After finishing his undergrad at Berkeley, he pursued a PhD at Stanford below Dr. Sebastian Thrun, Director of Stanford’s AI Lab (and now Chairman of Cresta). At Stanford, Zayd met CTO and co-founder Tim Shi — a parallel pressure of nature. Collectively, they dropped out to commercialize their analysis with an eye fixed on contact facilities.
Within the early days of Cresta, Zayd and Tim started with the assumption that AI would improve somewhat than exchange people. This meant that people could be within the engineering suggestions loop and the methods have to be designed to study from individuals as a lot as individuals realized from the system. This perception led them to a breakthrough technological method, which required particular advances within the basic AI platform. In consequence, they bought off to a comparatively sluggish begin versus corporations who merely utilized off-the-shelf AI, however in 2020, the know-how that Tim and Zayd initially envisioned took form and Cresta zoomed previous the aggressive area. The corporate had a breakout yr the place income quadrupled, as current shoppers realized large worth as they deployed Cresta throughout the enterprise and new shoppers signed up at a quick tempo.
Cresta creates worth for purchasers throughout quite a lot of verticals, together with Intuit, Porsche, Earthlink, and Cox Communications, in the end driving the most effective buyer conversations doable. In reality, a few of its Fortune 500 clients have seen greater than 20% enchancment in conversion price, 25% larger common order worth, and tens of millions of {dollars} in extra income in a matter of months.
If the final twenty years of know-how have been about transitioning software program from on-premise to the cloud, we predict the following two might be about transitioning software program from dumb to good. Zayd has this nice analogy the place he talks about books because the de facto medium of information dissemination immediately: if you wish to grow to be wonderful at one thing, you learn a e-book on how the greats did it, after which attempt to do it your self. However writing a e-book takes a very long time! What if, as a substitute, we had one thing that might intelligently report greatest practices from the greats in any area, after which personalize that content material to us, in actual time? That’s Cresta: the e-book that writes itself — and it’s solely getting began. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz are thrilled to accomplice with them on this journey.
Cresta is constructing a powerful crew throughout product, advertising, engineering and gross sales from locations like Google, Fb, Okta, AppDynamics, and Stanford. In the event you’re fascinated about becoming a member of the crew, try open positions right here.
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This weblog put up was written by Carl Eschenbach and Kais Khimji on behalf of Crew Sequoia and Ben Horowitz on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz. It additionally seems right here.
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