Cresta Raises $125M to Create the Unified Platform for Human and Virtual Agents – Read the post

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Leveraging Technology for AI Maturity: Choosing the Right Tools and Platforms

In today’s fast-evolving customer service landscape, staying ahead means more than just keeping up with trends—it requires a strategic focus on the tools and platforms that will future-proof your contact center. As enterprises navigate the complexities of AI adoption, understanding their stage of AI maturity becomes essential.

Closing Last-Mile Quality Management Gaps: The Role of Screen Recording in Contact Centers

Contact centers handle complex customer interactions, but fragmented tools often create inefficiencies and compliance challenges. Cresta's new screen recording feature closes this gap in quality management, providing comprehensive visibility into agent interactions. From ensuring regulatory compliance to driving performance improvements, screen recording is transforming contact center operations.

Happier Holidays: How Retail Contact Centers Can Tackle Seasonal Demands with AI

Retail contact centers are under immense pressure during the holiday season, as shoppers expect seamless and efficient support. AI-driven solutions can help tackle this demand surge by automating routine inquiries, enhancing personalization, and ensuring a smooth omnichannel experience. Learn how AI enables retail contact centers to deliver exceptional service, foster customer loyalty, and streamline operations during the busiest time of year.

Unlocking Customer Retention: How Aptive Uses Cresta to Save Customers and Drive Revenue

For Aptive Environmental, a leading pest control service provider, the stakes were high. With tens of thousands of customer interactions happening every month, ensuring consistency and quality was not just a goal but a necessity. When they partnered with Cresta, they didn’t just improve operations—they set a new benchmark for customer retention and efficiency.

Navigating Call Recording in Modern Contact Centers

With an ever-growing push for high-quality customer interactions and insights, recording customer service calls in the contact center has become both a practical necessity and a significant ethical and regulatory consideration. Read this blog to learn key considerations for securing customer consent.

Why workforce optimization software is no longer optional

Contact centers need to deliver seamless, personalized, and efficient service. This is where workforce optimization (WFO) software shines, transforming the way contact centers operate and setting the stage for a future where every interaction is not just managed, but optimized.

3 Tips for successful AI transformation

Get three key tips to a successful AI transformation, straight from David Garza, VP of Sales & Sales Operations at Brinks Home after his own successful AI implementation and deployment.

Cresta Crew: Rachel Bloch, Conversational AI Designer

In this installment of Cresta Crew, we shine a spotlight on Rachel Bloch, Conversational AI Designer at Cresta, and learn what that means, what a day in the life looks like for her, and what trends she foresees for AI in the contact center.

How to leverage quality management to modernize the contact center

In this blog post, we explore the power of quality management to elevate contact center operations, the essential features to look for in contact center quality management software, and the role of advanced technologies like AI in transforming quality management processes and mindsets.

How can speech analytics software improve your contact center?

Contact centers, the frontline of customer interaction, are critical enablers of a super experience and speech analytics software is an increasingly vital tool in the contact center arsenal. Learn how speech analytics software can turn customer conversations into actionable insights in this blog post.

Why driving down Average Handle Time is costing you money

We analyzed tens of thousands of conversations across Travel, Hospitality, and Financial Services to better understand AHT benchmarks in contact centers across three different industries - Travel, Hospitality, and Financial Services - and to explore how AHT impacts and intersects with revenue.

Recap: Cresta at CCW 2024

Join us in a recap of our exhilarating week at CCW 2024 - hear about the customer sessions at our booth, many demos, and more!

Generative AI’s role in the rapid advancement of CX

To clarify the value of generative AI in improving customer experience, Metrigy Research explored Generative AI’s Role in Rapid Advancement of CX in a recent whitepaper. We’ll highlight some of the report’s key insights to support your CX journey.

Cresta recognized as Leader in The Aragon Research Globe for Coaching

Coaching is a long-established best practice for managers hoping to drive agent performance, but traditional coaching is time consuming and labor intensive, making it difficult for supervisors to effectively coach even a small team of agents — let alone scale coaching to entire contact centers.

Recap: Cresta at CCW 2023

Cresta participated in CCW 2023, learning and educating attendees on how our generative AI-powered products transform the contact center.

Introducing Ocean-1: First Contact Center Foundation Model

We’ve created Ocean-1, a foundation model for the contact center. This large language model is the culmination of our experience in deploying generative AI systems for large enterprises and signifies our latest milestone in advancing the cutting edge AI technology for customer facing conversations.

How do Americans Feel About Engaging Virtually?

Cresta conducted a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults in November 2022 to better understand how Americans feel about engaging with virtual agents, and how these opinions may differ by geography and demographics. Here are our findings.

Seven Predictions for Generative AI in the Contact Center

AI has crossed the inflection point for working with human language. The innovations around large language models has led to a Cambrian explosion of applications. We believe that, more than ever, the future contact center will be fundamentally built around AI.

ChatGPT and Generative AI in the Enterprise

ChatGPT, a recently released Generative AI model, has taken the world by storm and sparked the interest of business executives. Its ability to generate fluent and useful text has understandably captured the attention of many leaders, across a wide variety of industries, looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Aragon Research Names Cresta as an Innovator for Conversational AI

Aragon Research, Inc has released their latest report, Aragon Research Globe for Conversational AI in the Intelligent Contact Center Report, listing Cresta in the “Innovator” section. The report is the first of its kind as it specifically focuses on conversational AI capabilities and solutions targeted to the contact center.

Cresta Named 2022 Hot Vendor by Aragon Research

Aragon Research’s Hot Vendor Awards are a yearly opportunity to select and recognize companies across different markets that are ‘noteworthy, visionary, and innovative.’ Cresta has been specifically recognized in the category of AI for the Contact Center.

How to Build Differentiated CX in Financial Services

How can financial services leaders build better CX to foster a loyal customer base? In a complex industry growing more saturated, a few key opportunities to stand apart have emerged. We’ll outline the ways financial businesses can differentiate themselves, and highlight the ways Cresta can help. Read this blog post to learn more.

A Three-Phased Guide to Happier Agents

As customer service agents grapple with high volume and increased pressure, it’s harder than ever to perform well. Agents who are good at their jobs are happier (and vice versa) — happy agents are less likely to leave. But long ramp times and short tenure mean many agents only achieve proficiency right before churning. Read this blog post to learn more why contact center should want to make their agents happy.

Cresta Achieves TISAX Compliance

Today, Cresta is excited to announce that we’re expanding our security compliance footprint with our recent achievement of TISAX compliance.

Agent Workflow

Simplifying The Agent Workflow

Introducing Omni Search and Guided Workflows. Now agents have everything they need to be a top performer on day one. No more searching for answers and workflows across knowledge bases.

Introducing Coaching Plans and Scorecards

Introducing Cresta's Coaching Plans and Scorecards, a contact center's home for coaching and scoring. Managers can score conversations, monitor agent performance over time, and create data-backed coaching plans, all through a single console.

How Gamification Can Keep Your Contact Center Agents Engaged

Gamification is the secret to some of the most successful contact centers. It encourages reps to achieve goals, motivates them to be more productive, and makes them feel more fulfilled in their roles. The happier the employee, the better the customer experience.

Cresta’s Commitment to Security with GitHub

Security of the Cresta platform is a core part of our strategy and competitive advantage. Cresta leverages GitHub in our software supply chain to ship secure code and cultivate a culture of security at Cresta.

How to Clone Your Best Agents (Ethically)

Cloning humans, while technically legal, is very, very not cool (ethically). But you can clone your top agent behaviors, 100% ethically, with AI-driven contact center training.

Why Transcription is Vital to Contact Center AI

No matter how rapidly contact center AI (CCAI) evolves, it’s important to understand it remains tethered to an easily overlooked factor — transcription accuracy — and it's crucial to understand why.

Contact center employee churn: How to stop the revolving door

Employee churn isn’t new — but today’s businesses are experiencing never-before-seen attrition levels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employee turnover rates are at near-record levels across the U.S., including retail, healthcare, and the foodservice industry.

Can You Hear a Smile?

Increased sales, larger deals, greater retention –– the benefits of offering great customer experiences (CX) are many and well documented. But significantly less research has been conducted into the relationship between customer experience and employee experience (EX) in the contact center. In short, so much time and energy are focused on the benefits of pleasing customers we forget there’s a serious upside to pleasing agents. And this is a big miss for those in CX leadership.

3 Compounding Benefits of AI-Driven, Real-Time Coaching

Cresta’s real-time coaching provides contact center agents with versatile coaching in-the-moment. By going beyond 1:1 coaching sessions and putting coaching into action during customer conversations, teams are able to unlock new levels of productivity.

Contact Center ROI: Transform Cost Centers into Value Centers

Like the call centers of yesteryear, modern customer service (CS) contact centers aren't known for being money makers for big brands. If anything, they're traditionally seen as cost centers, with a big focus placed on efficiency and cost savings. But CS leaders are challenging traditions as they continue to adapt to the pandemic rethink the contact center in the age of remote work.

Close the Retention Performance Gap with Real-Time Coaching

Our performance gap analysis of almost 20,000 conversations from a Fortune 50 software company revealed that top performers had a 65% higher retention rate than bottom performers. And through our additional analysis of 70,000 conversations from a leading telecom company, we determined that the bottom quartile performers had 42% more churn per conversation and 48% more lost revenue per conversation. These discrepancies in our metrics represent massive opportunities for retention teams.

2021’s Top 5 Contact Center Agent Swear Words

Unsurprisingly, these are three utterances that were completely absent from the 1.84 million customer conversations we analyzed from more than 15 contact centers to determine which swear words are most used by contact center agents.

The 4 “Magic” Behaviors that Close Sales Performance Gaps

We’ve identified a surprising gap in sales performance. We analyzed 340,000 sales conversations in Q1 2021 and discovered top performers generated $47 million in sales, compared to just $19 million by lower performers (~2.5x). So, what exactly made for such a huge gap between top and low sales performance?

Investing in Cresta: Supercharging Agents in Real-Time

Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Nailing customer experience is tough. Every conversation, across every channel, counts. And while much in our lives has changed since the 1960s, the site of these customer conversations has not: the contact center.

A Letter From the Founders

At Cresta, we’re on a mission to enable everyone to be 100x as effective at work. And today, we’re excited to announce our $50M Series B round of funding.

Action-Directed Language Model

Action Directed GPT-2

How we made a new controllable language model to make chat agents more effective by making them follow best actions.

Experts On Day One

Becoming an expert is difficult. We spent years in our PhD programs sitting in classrooms, reading papers, and programming to become “experts.”