Cresta is combining the science of artificial intelligence with the art of communication to observe customer interactions and uncover top agent behaviors that lead to successful customer outcomes, and then re-distributes these insights to sales & support agents in the form of personalized, real-time coaching that is tailored to each agent’s unique strengths and weaknesses, ultimately allowing clients to see how small changes in agent behavior are proven to drive significant business results.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Our company was born out of research at Stanford’s AI lab, where, in 2016 our co-founders set out to identify ways in which AI could be used to better support the workforce. Rather than using AI to automate work, the research sought to identify ways which AI could serve as an ally and sidekick to the workforce. Our founding team asked themselves: how AI could be used to help employees work with expert-level productivity and efficiency?
While there was no shortage of AI tools built to uncover anomalies in conversations and automate rote tasks, there weren’t tools that worked in real-time, in concert with humans, to understand our conversations and enhance our day-to-day performance.
Our team realized customer conversations are among a company’s most valuable resources. And yet U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service (source). Each conversation is an opportunity to make or break your brand.
Existing AI solutions can surface insights after conversations take place, but few solutions help workers while a conversation is taking place. Cresta realized if we could enhance a conversation between two people with expert guidance, while the conversation is taking place, we could not only help individuals perform better in their day to day tasks, but we could also drive measurable business results!
With this in mind, we launched Cresta in 2020. Cresta’s real-time intelligence platform for conversations uses AI to observe conversations, identify high-leverage expert behaviors, and coaches teams to exhibit those behaviors using AI-powered guidance that coaches agents in real-time during conversations.
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What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Avoiding burnout has to start with personal wellbeing. Look at things that bring you energy, because energy isn’t a zero-sum game. What you do personally that brings you energy brings you energy at work. If you’re happy at home, it makes you happier at work. Invest in both.
What can we hope to see from Cresta in the future?
We will be making fundamental advancements to the platform that will further reduce the need for training models. We are looking at voice models for contextual conversational intelligence and how we can harness the power of AI to continue to amplify people’s natural communication abilities.
