There are moments in product development that almost feel magical.
A moment where the right market timing, technology, and experience culminate, and I believe that this is one of those moments.
To date, Cresta has been laser-focused on developing an unparalleled understanding of customer conversations and the behaviors that drive successful outcomes to enable rapid business change at scale in some of the world’s leading contact centers. This happens through our products: Conversation Intelligence and Agent Assist, powered by our workflow engine, Opera. In many cases, this has come to life in the previous generation of our Virtual Agent product.
Our progress thus far has laid a solid foundation for integrating autonomous solutions into enterprise environments.
However, we’ve always felt that the previous generation of virtual agents left more to be desired. Earlier generations of flow-based virtual agents struggle to handle diverse customer needs and can become administrative nightmares – a limitation I’ve struggled with since co-founding Google CCAI. On the other hand, early efforts by others to rely on purely generative virtual agents have led to high-profile mistakes and hallucinations that led to businesses needing to handle damage control.
These challenges aren’t just customer perception; they are genuine issues affecting the bottom line for many organizations. According to Metrigy’s “AI for Business Success Consumer Perspectives 2024-25”, 40.6% of customers avoid virtual agents.
I’m excited to share a massive step forward that will shift the paradigm: Cresta Voice Virtual Agent.
Introducing Cresta Voice Virtual Agent
Combining the power of generative AI and our human-centric platform approach, we’re bringing a whole new voice virtual agent to market.
One that…
- Provides 24/7 personalized and empathetic customer experiences
- Handles complex, multi-step workflows
- Works seamlessly with and learns from your human agents
…All in one platform. Let’s get into the details.
Always available, our virtual agent provides thoughtful, personalized, and empathetic support, continuously learning from virtual and human interactions to ensure that every customer experience is surprisingly delightful.
Traditional virtual agents usually handle only basic queries, but Cresta Voice Virtual Agent is designed to troubleshoot even the most complex challenges and proactively identifies upsell opportunities.
Our innovative hybrid architecture combines the strengths of large language models (LLMs) with deterministic systems. This allows our agents to engage in natural conversations, using the flexibility of LLMs to generate human-like, contextually appropriate responses while adhering to business rules. This synergy enhances engagement, ensures output quality, and maintains control and trust throughout every customer interaction.
What does this all mean for your customers? It means interacting with virtual agents that feel genuinely human. Our agents are designed to handle interruptions gracefully, recognize emotional cues, exhibit empathy, and solve issues quickly. Imagine a virtual agent managing multiple inquiries simultaneously without losing track or becoming overwhelmed.
What does this mean for your business? It means a virtual agent that evolves as your business evolves. By leveraging insights derived from human-agent interactions within a continuous learning loop, we meticulously track performance after each conversation, allowing you to identify behaviors and conversational flows that drive successful outcomes. This enables us to pinpoint conversations ideal for automation and reduce the resources required for their implementation. This also ensures the virtual agent mimics the best practices of all of your top agents, enhancing the customer experience.
With Cresta Virtual Agent, you can dramatically reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and unlock new revenue opportunities in ways you couldn’t before – all at the same time.
But What Is the Market Missing?
The excitement in the AI space is palpable, driven by both hyperscalers and investors. It’s no wonder, as Battery Ventures estimates that the contact center market represents $450 billion in annual human labor costs. With high agent attrition rates and inefficient processes, this arena presents a ripe opportunity for innovative AI solutions.
However, many players in the market approach this challenge incorrectly:
- New entrants often focus solely on automation and virtual agents
- Companies that have been around for some time grapple with legacy technologies that inhibit innovation
- Hyperscalers are more focused on their underlying models (and lock customers into their models) and are spreading their bets across many different use cases and industries, rather than building enterprise-grade solutions that specifically address the needs of contact centers
Additionally, many solutions today focus exclusively on chat, while voice remains the top used channel at over 70% of interactions, according to Metrigy research.
A Unified Platform for Human and Virtual Agents
At Cresta, we envision a future that embraces both augmentation and automation within a cohesive platform.
Augmentation is essential, and we believe that humans will always have a role in the contact center.
As it gets cheaper to handle customer interactions with some degree of automation, there will be more interactions as companies no longer avoid their customers, but rather approach them proactively. The best agents, supported by AI, will be a competitive advantage in higher leverage moments in the customer journey.
That’s why we prioritized it from the beginning, and ensured that we fully understand and capture all of the complex behaviors human agents do in every interaction. Interactions that are increasingly different as customers call in with new challenges or questions each day.
Today, our solutions equip agents with co-pilots that handle real-time transcription, automatically compose responses, write and extract conversation summaries, and give real-time guidance based on the behaviors of top agents.
Companies like Cox Communications and Aptive have experienced over 3x ROI by implementing our solutions in their contact centers.
With this foundation, now is the ideal time to invest in automation using our new voice virtual agent.
Early adopters can immediately see value through simple use cases like authentication, updating shipping addresses, or answering calls that previously went to voicemail. This can create an entry point to start and automate more over time, providing a sustainable competitive edge.
Organizations poised for enduring success will be those that combine human agent augmentation with virtual agent automation.
Why This Approach Matters
Augmenting human agents captures day-to-day behaviors and workflows, which is essential for refining future models and automation.
Although we expect virtual agents to automate more and more use cases over time, we expect this to be an opportunity for human agents to become even more skilled – not only handling the cases that virtual agents are not ready to handle or that a human touch is best for, but also supporting virtual agents as coaches and points of escalation (thus also creating career pathing for top agents).
In addition, by consolidating both these human and virtual conversations and data into a single platform, we can easily identify opportunities to further automate, to quality manage and coach our agents (human and virtual) , and drive a holistic view of the customer journey.
The winning strategy revolves around leveraging a unified platform that supports both human and virtual agents — a synergy that amplifies benefits for all.
Navigating the Journey Ahead
Automating a $450 billion human labor investment will undoubtedly take time (and likely won’t completely move to automation). Our customer advisory board recently estimated that the percentage of conversations automated through virtual agents over the next two to three years could range anywhere from 20% to 90%. Each organization is uniquely influenced by its customer base and regulatory environment.
The takeaway is clear: automation will not happen overnight. Rather than worry, we should use this time to prepare for automated solutions that meet customer expectations.
What Steps Can We Take Now?
- Capture daily human agent conversations, identify successful behaviors, and maximize rep performance with coaching to ensure your virtual agents can build upon this data
- Accelerate the consolidation of knowledge into a unified system
- Establish career paths for current agents, positioning them as the human-in-the-loop for supervising virtual agents in the future
Don’t overlook identifying simple automation use cases for immediate implementation — whether for surveys, sales lead qualification, or replacing traditional IVR with IVA. We’re here to guide you along this journey.
Cresta Voice Virtual Agent isn’t just a product; it represents a blueprint for the future of customer experience, merging advanced AI technology with a profound understanding of human behavior.
Partnering with the right transformation expert allows you to tap into your contact center’s true potential, and we’re here to help.
Request a demo here or reach out to your Cresta representative today.
