Today’s interview is with Brittany Bell, a Customer Success Manager at Cresta AI, which provides contact center agents real-time suggestions and coaching, whether in an individual call or chat session, to help them deliver the best outcomes. Brittany joined me to talk about why she made the switch from BPO to vendor side, the emerging landscape of the agent experience, the importance of live channels, ‘Experts on Day One’, contact centre churn and how Cresta’s technology works.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX, loyalty and retention – Lessons from diverse industries – Interview with Andrea Prazakova of Mastercard and David Boucher of Aster DM Healthcare – and is number 415 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Brittany:

• I joined Cresta as I wanted to become part of the solution instead of being part the ever spinning flywheel of the problem where we’re just churning through agents.
• The employee churn rate in contact centers is sometimes north of 40%, although I’ve heard horror stories where people have got up to 100%.
• Cresta’s maxim: Experts on Day One.
• Cresta’s true north is that they want to make every single agent employee 100 times better.
• They aim to make them 10 X faster and 10 x more efficient through the use of different assistance technologies like auto completing their sentences and recommending what they should say next.
• This helps them be 10 X better meaning more effective, more likely to convert a sale, more likely to retain the customer and to get a positive CSAT score.
• They are doing that through learning from top performers, via historical data, using machine learning to better understand what those top performers are doing. They then give that same guidance and advice in real time during any conversation to all of the agents.
• A large proportion of agent attrition happens in the first 60- 90 days and as soon as someone comes out of training. What happens is that agents struggle for 30 days and then they are back looking on the job market.
• We want to give the employees the assistance and the real time coaching that they need so that they have the energy and the empathy to immediately handle complex customer scenarios.
• If agents are not properly trained, properly enabled, properly supported, they’re never going to have the energy that’s required to really wow that customer.
• Cresta’s technology works across both text based and audio channels.
• What’s very unique about Cresta is that it’s really not keyword based, it’s about context. That means they can recommend the next best thing to say based on actual context as opposed to the specific words uttered.
• Cresta was just recently recognized as being one of the top 40 intelligent applications by the IA40.
• Client examples:
  • Blue Nile, an online jewelry retailer, turned to Cresta when they created a chat channel for the first time. They made the decision to buy Cresta with the goal of improving conversions and improving customer satisfaction. And, as a secondary target they also wanted to improve their order value. Within the first two months of the Blue Nile team coming on board with Cresta they saw that their conversion rates were jumping up about 10- 20% higher than their baselines. A Blue Nile exec just recorded a testimonial for them where he stated that what he was most excited about was not that their profit or conversion rates were going up. While all of that was true, he was most excited by the idea that he was able to pay the highest monthly commissions to his chat agents that he ever had for two months straight at the time that he recorded the testimonial.
  • Holiday Inn Club is one of our newer customers and they utilize the voice channel. They’re in the travel and timeshare industry and through utilizing Cresta they have been able to really improve their agent coaching. They’ve been able to reduce escalations and improve customer satisfaction by a 10-20% margin. They’ve also been able to save coaches 3-5 hours per week in researching escalations, quality assurance ate and they can then take that time to meaningfully engage with their employees, provide coaching, and the emotional support that means to be a great leader.

• I think there’s a growing interest in the gig work landscape and that doesn’t necessarily lend itself all the time to traditional contact center or customer experience where you want someone with tenure and specialization. So, I do think that we will need better, we’ll need better training, will need better coaching and assistance to enable someone who’s on a flexible schedule or who’s a gig worker to provide that good experience.
• A recent Forbes article estimated that there could be up to 45% of adults in the United States that are in gig or part time work by the end of this year.
• Brittany’s best possible advice is to listen to problems with an empathetic ear.
  • In action: Doordash recently reinstated its policy that every single member of the Doordash team, all the way up to the top level executives, have to do at least one Doordash delivery a month.
  • Listen to what employees and customers are saying and then strategically make changes that will try to fill in those gaps.

• Brittany’s Punk CX word: Augment.
• Brittany’s Punk XL brand: Cresta [shameless self plug 😉 ]

About Brittany

Brittany Bell is a Customer Success Manager at Cresta AI where she partners with some of the world’s leading organizations to best utilize contact center agent assistance software. With over a decade of successful experience in operating contact centers in her past, Brittany can relate with her clients and provide meaningful guidance across topics even beyond software. Brittany loves data analysis and being strategic in priorities based on what she can see in the numbers. When not striving to better enable contact center agents, you’d likely find Brittany studying up on random knowledge that could come in handy for bar trivia.

Check out Cresta.com, the IA40 list, say Hi to them on Twitter @Cresta and feel free to connect with Brittany on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to xresch on Pixabay for the image.