Cresta, a company whose mission is to enable office workers to be Experts on Day One®, announced $21M in funding from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie and Vivi Nevo. Cresta also announced that its transformative software for contact centers, a $310 billion market, is now available to the public. Fortune 500 companies using Cresta are already seeing their agents become more effective and more efficient, and ramp up in significantly less time.
Spun out of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab, Cresta was founded by Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun. Using AI, Cresta codifies the psychology, behavior, and language that top contact center agents use to achieve successful outcomes. Once this expertise is learned, Cresta re-distributes it to every agent in real-time, effectively turning every agent into an immediate expert. The software continues to learn and adapt over time, enabling agents to more quickly adapt to changing customer and business needs. This results in hundreds-of-millions of dollars in incremental revenue driven by the software.
“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 7 months for contact center agents to ramp up with an average tenure of only 11 months, we knew we had to start there.”
Cresta’s product guides agents as they have conversations in real-time in three areas:
- Guided selling responses help agents craft what to say at each point in the conversation based off of what an expert would say in the same situation. Suggestions are learned based on data from hundreds of thousands of historical conversations and Cresta continues to learn from expert agents over time.
- Personalized coaching makes it automated and continuous by identifying each agent’s strengths and weaknesses based on industry best practices and existing quality assurance guidelines. It then provides real-time coaching guidance during each conversation to result in behavior changes in a fraction of the time.
- Workflow automation integrates at the browser level with a dozen of these fragmented software pieces that contact center agents spend a bulk of their day interacting with. It helps agents carry out common workflows such as placing orders and looking up customer information, without having to switch software.
One of Cresta’s early customers, a market leading financial services company, utilized Cresta to double conversion and help agents rapidly gain expertise ahead of their busy season. In just 5 weeks of using Cresta, new agents were already performing at veteran levels, a process that took as long as 7 months before.
“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, Cresta Investor and Partner at Greylock. “Cresta’s technology improves contact center agents’ effectiveness and accelerates productivity, and enables the companies using them to deliver differentiated customer experiences. We’re thrilled to partner with Zayd, Tim and Sebastian as they grow their solution for this important market shift.”
“Zayd and Tim are visionary co-founders who are solving the fundamental human problem of how expertise is gained and shared,” said Cresta co-founder and Chairman, Sebastian Thrun. “In the lab, Zayd built early versions of Cresta that doubled the throughput of partner sales teams and increased effectiveness by 54%. When we saw those results, we knew we were on to something huge. I can’t wait to see how Cresta grows from here.”
“For any sales organization, the question is always how do you make every salesperson as good as the best one,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and an early investor in Cresta. “This is very much a human enhancement problem and Zayd, Tim, and Sebastian are the right team to tackle it. We are thrilled to partner with them on this endeavor.”
ABOUT CRESTA
Cresta was founded by Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun as a spinoff out of Stanford’s AI lab. The startup has raised a total of $21M in fundraising from top VCs and investors such as Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie and Vivi Nevo. For more information, please visit: https://www.cresta.com
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