The real-time contact center intelligence provider Cresta Intelligence Inc. said today it’s updating its platform with the addition of new tools that enable smarter business insights and more capable chatbots.

Cresta has created an artificial intelligence-powered platform for contact centers that’s designed to guide customer service agents on what to say and do at each turn of a customer conversation. For instance, it provides real-time prompts for agents at pivotal moments in a conversation to optimize their response.

At the same time, it coaches agents on an ongoing basis to hone their strengths and correct their weaknesses. In this way, Cresta helps to make sure that agents ask the right discovery questions at the beginning of a conversation, so as to solve customer’s problems more effectively. Cresta also aids productivity by automating repetitive tasks such as filling out forms and pulling up customer records, saving agents the trouble of doing it themselves.

The startup said today it’s building on these capabilities with new tools such as Cresta Insights, which helps business leaders to better understand their customer’s intent, and Cresta Chatbot, an offering that helps to identify and automate high-value chatbot use cases.

More specifically, Cresta Insights uses AI to analyze customer-agent conversations as they happen and provide broader insights that can help to drive business strategy and direction. For instance, it can provide a deeper understanding of customer behaviors, surface emerging customer trends, product gaps and more, the company said.

As for Cresta Chatbot, this is a tool for creating self-service chatbots that can resolve customer needs without the intervention of a human agent. Companies can identify the most valuable opportunities for automation using Cresta Insights, and then develop and field-test new chatbots with Cresta Chatbot.

Cresta said it has updated its existing tools too, including its Cresta Agent Assist offering. For example, it has gained new Auto Summarization and Auto Note Taking capabilities that eliminate the need for agents to take notes and summarize the outcome of each call they handle. Meanwhile, Knowledge Assist and Guided Workflows, which use the context of customer conversations to recommend knowledge articles and workflows, have also been enhanced.

Contact center managers may appreciate the updates to Cresta Director, which is an AI-powered console that provides business leaders with visibility into customer interactions. For instance, Cresta Director now provides scorecards and personalized coaching plans for each agent, with notes, snippets and coaching metrics. It also gains a new Live Assist feature that enables managers to communicate with agents through Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Finally, Cresta Opera is a new addition to Cresta Director that provides managers with a simple, no-code interface for building AI-powered coaching solutions that can be deployed across the contact center.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Liz Miller told SiliconANGLE that Cresta is one of a long list of customer and revenue intelligence solutions that are leveraging AI to crunch real-time customer data. “We see applications being used in everything from sales training and intelligence settings to agent assistance and contact center operations,” she said.

Miller explained that with today’s updates, Cresta is betting on its capacity to extract actionable moments and recommendations from customer data, so as to benefit revenue and experience moments well beyond the call center. In doing so, this allows revenue, sales and service teams to draw from the same pool, she explained.

“You could argue that the larger holistic platforms that offer an entire suite of experience enablers, like Salesforce or Microsoft, can do this too,” Miller continued. “But Cresta is banking on getting customers up and running regardless of platform. Based on their results tied to revenues, they might be onto something.”

Cresta Vice President of Product and Engineering Ping Wu explained that the company’s goal is to make it simple for every contact center to adopt conversational AI technology.

“This means using our Real-Time Intelligence platform to help agents, managers and executives before, during and after a conversation,” Wu said. “Our summer release enables this with one of the most comprehensive and integrated contact center AI offerings in the market.”

Image: Cresta