Highlights:
- Crescendo has the capability to translate chatbot responses into over 50 languages for businesses with global clientele.
- Crescendo announced that it has acquired PartnerHero, a business services provider based in Boise, Idaho, in connection with its fundraising announcement.
Customer service startup Crescendo raised USD 50 million in the funding round at a valuation of USD 500 million.
General Catalyst spearheaded the Series C investment. Alorica, Celesta Capital, and a number of angel investors joined it.
Crescendo, officially known as CrescendoAI Inc., offers a customer support service that eliminates the requirement for businesses to develop their contact centers. For basic questions, the service uses CX Assistant, an artificial intelligence assistant. The customer support representatives at Crescendo handle more complicated inquiries that the AI is unable to handle on its own.
Competing chatbots that can handle support tickets without human involvement are widely available. They often don’t, however, give businesses access to a team of support representatives, so they must assemble a contact center team from the ground up. According to Crescendo, their service eliminates this need, cutting the initial setup time from months to a matter of days.
Businesses can train large language models on their own knowledge libraries to power the AI assistant at the heart of the offering. For instance, a retailer could feed the chatbot product information from its online store. With that data, Crescendo can then automatically respond to inquiries customers have about its products.
Companies may adjust the style in which the assistant generates responses based on their internal marketing policies. Crescendo has the capability to translate chatbot responses into over 50 languages for businesses with global clientele.
In addition to responding to inquiries from online customers about products, the company’s platform facilitates various use cases related to customer care. Crescendo’s AI might be set up by a software developer to assist users with troubleshooting inquiries. In turn, e-commerce businesses can utilize it to handle product return requests and offer updates on shipment.
An AI-generated response quality evaluation tool is included with Crescendo’s platform, and it is expected to get better with time. Every customer interaction is also assigned a quality score by the software. Companies get account credit that can be used to buy customer support capacity if the score shows that a support request wasn’t handled effectively.
According to the organization, contact center personnel can save a substantial amount of time by utilizing its platform. It claims that some businesses can respond to over 90% of pre-sales inquiries without the need for human intervention due to the integrated AI assistant. A substantial percentage of a business’s technical support tickets can also be handled by the program.
Crescendo announced that it has acquired PartnerHero, a business services provider based in Boise, Idaho, in connection with its fundraising announcement. Among other things, it provides enterprises with a customer service solution to handle support queries.
Crescendo Co-founder and President Anand Chandrasekaran, said, “Our value proposition is to offer a full stack contact center solution with outcome-driven pricing. That proposition was driven by our insight that AI offered a unique ‘why now’ moment to address the 20-year misalignment in the contact center industry in how it serves and charges customers.”
Crescendo is the latest in a long line of businesses seeking investment to use AI to boost contact center productivity. In July, USD 140 million was raised by IntelePeer Cloud Communications LLC for a machine learning platform designed to automate repetitive customer assistance duties. A few weeks prior, Battery Ventures and additional institutional investors supported Level AI Inc. in a USD 39.4 million funding round.