TLDR
CVS Health’s AI transformation is driven by a clear enterprise strategy: improving customer and member experiences at scale, with Cresta. Beginning with call summarization, CVS saw immediate reductions in after-call work, stronger CSR focus, and high adoption. More importantly, Cresta enabled a breakthrough: predictive CSAT scoring on 100% of calls, dramatically accelerating time to insight and enabling proactive issue resolution. With Cresta as a co-development partner, CVS is now unlocking large-scale intelligence across its call centers, building the foundation for deeply personalized, proactive healthcare experiences.
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At Cresta’s flagship event in November, we were joined by Srikant Narasimhan, Vice President, Head of Enterprise Customer Experience & Insights at CVS Health. In a session on ‘Leading Complex Enterprise Organizations’, Srikant shared how the company has approached transforming their business with AI.
CVS Health is guided by a clear North Star: to become the most trusted company in health care. With that mandate, leaders were determined to go through the evaluation and deployment process with a disciplined alignment to strategy, rather than a proliferation of disconnected pilots.
Internally, CVS also faced the common enterprise challenge of coordinating across multiple large and diverse lines of business, each with its own operations, P&L, and priorities, making alignment and consistency at scale difficult. Moreover, traditional survey-based feedback simply wasn’t keeping pace: CVS was relying on low response rates and delayed signals.
Additionally, agents were burdened with manual note-taking, creating inefficiencies and increasing cognitive load in an already demanding role.
CVS needed speed, accuracy, consistency, and scale, delivered in a way that aligned tightly with enterprise strategy.
Selecting a True Co-Development Partner
CVS wanted to choose a partner capable of co-creating long-term value: “a partner that you can work with, that you can build a relationship with, and that will co-develop and create with you.”
Cresta stood out due to its willingness to collaborate deeply, and this partnership model allowed CVS to rapidly test, refine, and scale advanced capabilities, especially in the area of predictive CSAT and call scoring.
Immediate Reduction in After-Call Work
Call summarization was chosen as CVS’s first AI use case because it delivered fast ROI and built the foundational dataset needed for more advanced work. As Srikant explained,
“There was almost immediate return in terms of reductions in after-call work time.”
By automating note-taking:
- CSRs saved time
- Agents could focus on the next customer instead of tedious and time-consuming documentation
- Adoption and executive buy-in came quickly, driven by the clear value to frontline teams
This wasn’t just an operational win; it improved the agent and customer experience simultaneously.
Scoring Predictive CSAT on 100% of Calls
One of the most transformative results CVS unlocked with Cresta was the shift from limited surveys to AI-driven, real-time scoring of every interaction.
“One of the biggest things that unlocks for us with Cresta has been the ability to score the predictive CSAT on every single call… Now we’ve scored 100% of our calls.”
This created capabilities that were previously impossible:
- Agent-level performance insights from the customer’s perspective
- Identification of avoidable calls and challenge areas
- Richer understanding of sentiment, trust, and call outcomes
- A shift from reactive survey-driven insight to proactive operational intelligence
Srikant highlights the transformational shift this unlocks:
“It gives us that credibility using operational data and scale… We don’t need to ask. We know what’s wrong.”
Dramatically Faster Time to Insight — From Weeks to Immediate
CVS shared a real example involving a formulary change that generated customer concern. Srikant shared the story:
“We made a pretty public change that caused some consumer angst. So traditionally, what we would do, we would wait, get the survey volume, look at the surveys…It's usually a couple of weeks. Then, you go try to do something with it.
With this new capability, we saw it right away. We're like, hey. Look. This is popping. The volume is going up. We can see the sentiments declining. What's going on? And we were able to get ahead of it right away, and being more proactive with communication, explaining alternatives to customers, talking to our CSRs and our supervisors. So the time to insight is so accelerated.”
This shift—from waiting for problems to proactively identifying and addressing them—is central to CVS’s long-term transformation vision. Powered by Cresta’s real-time insights, CVS is able to identify and resolve customer challenges before dissatisfaction can escalate. Srikant explained:
“We should understand the experience without having to ask… This capability is going to allow us to be proactive, to solve the issue.”
This represents a fundamental step toward personalized, anticipatory healthcare experiences, a key competitive differentiator across CVS’s ecosystem.
What’s Next: Scaling Insight, Real-Time Agent Assist, and Deeper Understanding of Customer Behavior
CVS is now extending Cresta’s capabilities beyond summarization and scoring:
- Real-time agent assist for navigating thousands of documents during complex calls
- Deeper analysis of avoidable calls to improve digital self-service
- Understanding the voice of the customer to build trust and engagement
These next steps move CVS further toward proactive, personalized, emotionally attuned service experiences.
To learn more about CVS Health's journey, watch our on-demand sessions here.
