We are excited to announce a product that our engineers have been working hard on over the last months: Cresta for Voice. This brings Cresta’s Real-time Expertise AI to phone-based teams. With Cresta for Voice, teams can benefit from our real-time assistance and outcome-based Expertise Engine to drive productivity, improve customer experience, and ultimately deliver business outcomes. In this blog post, we want to share the journey that got us here and showcase the product that all of our engineers have been working towards.

“We take pride in providing exceptional customer service, and given the results we’ve already seen from using Cresta’s chat offering, becoming an early adopter of Cresta for Voice was an easy choice”
- Brigitte Wright-Roy, SVP of Customer Operations, Earthlink
“The results Cresta is delivering is not achievable by conventional means.”
- John Donovan, Former CEO, AT&T

Stop buying tools, start buying results

When we launched Cresta last year, there was one thing we knew, the enterprise software status quo needed to change. All too often, software solutions offer promises of transformative results, but when asked whether a software is delivering ROI, executives struggle to come up with an answer. At Cresta, we believe it’s time for businesses to stop buying software and start buying results.

Software should help businesses definitively reach their most pressing goals. For sales teams this might mean improving conversion rates or growing average order value. For service teams this might mean reducing average handle time (AHT), increasing first-call resolution rate (FCR) or improving CSAT. And for retention teams, this might mean finding opportunities to prevent churn.

Today’s solutions don’t drive business outcomes

When we looked at how phone-based teams optimize performance, we noticed some key gaps.

Real-time Expertise AI fills the gap between insight and action in the market today.
  • Speech Analytics: Speech analytics, quality assurance (QA), and coaching tools make it easy to extract insights from conversations. Putting these insights into action is still a manual and expensive process, with most teams only reviewing 1-2% of calls.
  • Automation and Bots: Automation is a valuable way to deflect calls and automate redundant work for representatives. But chatbots still struggle to deliver quality customer experience.
  • Customer Experience (CX): CX solutions offer feedback and survey results that highlight how customers feel. But what do you do with that information? Businesses still need to figure out how to act on these insights and actually improve their CX.

There’s clearly a gap between gathering insights and putting them into action. And it’s this gap which makes determining ROI so challenging. And it’s this gap which Cresta is closing with our Expertise AI. Cresta can uniquely close this gap for two reasons: our AI is real-time and outcome-based.

Real-time AI drives consistent behavior change.

Driving measurable business impact requires consistent team performance. Consistent team performance is no easy task.

Source: https://www.learnupon.com/blog/ebbinghaus-forgetting-curve/

When analyzing customer data, we typically see a 3x - 4x gap in top and bottom performers for key metrics conversion rate.

We’re forgetful. It’s human nature. In 1855, Hermann Ebbinghaus illustrated our forgetfulness with the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, with some studies suggesting we forget 50% of new information within an hour of learning it, and 70% within 24 hours.

One way to solve this is with real-time assistance and coaching delivered at just the right moment during a conversation. Real-time assistance and coaching is core to our Expertise AI and available on Cresta for Voice.

Outcome-based AI connects behavior change to business outcomes.

Cresta’s Expertise AI is outcome-based, meaning our AI optimizes itself based on the KPIs and business outcomes most important to your business. This approach yielded great results for Cresta for Chat, with enterprise clients seeing results like 25% more revenue per chat and 19.1% improvement in NPS. Today, we’re excited to extend this outcome-based approach to Cresta for Voice.

Cresta’s Expertise Engine: The Foundation for Operating at the Speed of Conversation

Understanding voice in real-time is challenging. Tone, accent and the non-linear conversations can easily fool rigid, rule-based, simplistic AI systems. To power our real-time and outcome-based AI we architected Cresta’s Expertise Engine from the ground up.

  • Semantic Moments. Rule-based and keyword-based methods for interpreting conversations are not scalable. Through reusable building blocks called “Moments” Crseta identifies key moments in conversations in real time - objections, recommendations, frustrations, etc. This lets customers quickly spin up an accurate and flexible  conversational AI system very quickly.
  • Outcome-based Actions: Again, outcomes, not software. To achieve these outcomes, Cresta can connect semantic moments with critical actions in real time, such as sending agents a hint, offering a knowledge article, or triggering an automation workflow. These actions help our customers drive measurable results and ROI in weeks.
Cresta's patented approach to identifying key semantic moments in conversations and triggering the optimal action to reach a desired business outcome.

Announcing Cresta for Voice

Cresta for Voice is built upon our Expertise Engine and drives lasting behavior change that delivers measurable business outcomes.

Real-time Agent Assist: Better conversations start here.

  • Suggested responses: Help teams stay on track and navigate down the ideal call flow for each customer inquiry with step-by-step guidance.
  • Behavioral coaching: Live coaching presented during conversations helps  representatives upskill themselves and focus on key development areas like building rapport or overcoming objections.
  • Knowledge base (beta): Cresta automatically queries structured and unstructured databases to immediately present teams with answers to customer questions.
  • Workflow automation (beta): Let representatives focus on connecting with your customers. Cresta takes care of transcribing calls, taking notes, and creating leads and tickets.

AI Director: Monitor team performance, coach teams, and measure business outcomes

It’s not only about real-time assistance and coaching.  In fact, we find managers spend more than 50% of their week reviewing calls. Because of this, they struggle to review more than 1-2% of calls. The solution requires more than just transcribing 100% of calls (which we also do).

AI Director and Realtime Agent Progression lets teams quickly review team progress against key behaviors.

Cresta’s AI-Director helps managers accelerate coaching and performance management by reviewing 100% of calls and surfacing the key moments where managers should focus their coaching efforts. Managers can review team performance against key behaviors, leave comments, and set coaching reminders which Cresta then presents during conversations. End-to-end coaching.

Actions Studio

Action Studio lets managers tailor and personalize coaching before it's presented to agents via Cresta's real-time assistance.

We believe AI should be accessible and easy to manage. With this in mind, we’ve created the Actions Dashboard. Here, managers can fine tune and influence the coaching and assistance that are presented to agents. This allows managers to work alongside Cresta and develop personalized coaching plans that cater to each agent’s strengths and weaknesses.

Business Insights

Business Insights lets management track how front-line behaviors are impacting critical KPIs.

Tying everything back to what matters most, business outcomes, Cresta’s Business Insights gives teams an executive-level view of business performance. What does this mean? It means leadership can review front-line performance, run analysis, and see how front-line performance is driving business KPIs like AHT, CSAT, and conversion rate.

We hope that gives you an overview of our Voice offering. We’re truly excited to bring this offering to market and look forward to seeing how businesses use this offering to radically improve productivity, drive business outcomes, and most importantly, deliver memorable customer experiences.

Special thanks to:

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