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Contact Center AI Startup Cresta Launches with Workforce Management Solution
AI startup firm Cresta has rocketed out of stealth mode with a cool $21 million in funding. The company, based in San Francisco, aims to empower contact center agents by using AI to help them become more effective and efficient. Their solution offers significant benefits from a workforce management standpoint while also encouraging productivity increases.
Born from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University, Cresta codifies the psychology, behavior and language of top performing contact center agents. The company then uses its software to re-distribute that knowledge to all agents in real time, while also learning and adapting along the way. The goal is to help contact center agents achieve successful outcomes by quickly adapting to changing customer and business needs.
“The last major technology revolution out of Stanford’s AI lab was the foundational tech for self-driving cars which led us to think, ‘Where could we have an even bigger impact based on the amount of time that people spend their day?’” said Zayd Enam, co-founder and CEO of Cresta. “When we learned it takes seven months for contact center agents to ramp up with an average tenure of only 11 months, we knew we had to start there.”
The contact center market is a ripe candidate for AI technology, particularly from a workforce management standpoint. Suffering from one of the highest turnover rates of any industry in the U.S., contact center workers’ chief complaints include a lack of training, challenges and incentives. And while plenty of AI technology exists to automate and expedite common and popular customer queries, the market for helping human agents increase their knowledge and performance as well as improve their empathy skills is still fairly thin.
“Contact centers are undergoing a significant transformation as AI automates basic tasks and agents need to be upskilled to better focus on interactions with customers," said Saam Motamedi, partner at Greylock, one of the firms investing in Cresta. “Cresta’s technology improves contact center agents’ effectiveness and accelerates productivity, and enables the companies using them to deliver differentiated customer experiences.”
Cresta’s AI solution focuses on three areas for helping contact center agents as they converse with customers in real time, promoting more efficient and automated workforce management. It offers guided selling responses, which essentially help agents choose their words at each point during a customer interactions. Suggestions are provided based on data aggregated from hundreds of thousands of conversations.
The offering also includes automated and continuous personalized coaching, which pinpoints each agent’s strengths and weaknesses. Coaching offers real-time guidance during each customer interaction with the goal of prompting behavior changes in agents. AI and automation are meant to achieve those changes in a fraction of the time over human training and coaching.
The Cresta solution also offers workflow automation at the browser level, interacting with dozens of software pieces. This helps agents toggle among common workflows like placing orders and looking up historical customer information without the need to switch software.
Edited by Maurice Nagle