... [+]Customer service has long been the “stinky armpit” of businesses, says Zayd Enam, the CEO and cofounder of Cresta, a startup that makes software for just that purpose. But that sentiment is starting to shift, as evidenced by Zoom’s attempt to kickstart its second act with a splashy $14.7 billion attempt to buy call center company Five9., but Zoom and Five9—as well as Genesys, another giant in the call center industry—are now coming together to invest in Enam’s company, called Cresta.
Cresta launched out of stealth in 2020, the outcome of a Stanford AI lab project started by Enam, chief technology officer Tim Shi and Google X founder Sebastian Thrun .list of promising AI startups last year. The company’s AI-powered software provides real-time insights during a conversation to help customer service agents resolve issues, and salespeople to close deals.
The startup targets large enterprise companies and is approaching 100 such customers, which include Verizon, CarMax and Porsche. Revenue tripled in 2021 and is now in the double digits of millions, Enam says. A big driver of that growth, he notes, is not new customers, but rather existing users, as demonstrated by a net retention rate of more than 200%.
The new capital will go towards building out more features, primarily to gather more insights from the things a customer says during a call, according to Enam. “We can say, for example, ‘this way of pitching the product is not resonating with your customers’ or ‘your competitors are offering a more effective and cheaper solution,’” he says. “Then our users can make a change and then have that propagated to their contact center agents.” Cresta employs 150 people, and plans to hire more.
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