Customer service startup Crescendo today announced that it has closed a $50 million funding round at a $500 million valuation.

General Catalyst led the Series C investment. It was joined by Celesta Capital, Alorica and several angel investors. 

Crescendo, officially CrescendoAI Inc., provides a customer support service that removes the need for companies to set up their own contact centers. The service uses an artificial intelligence assistant, CX Assistant, to field simple inquiries. More complex requests that the AI can’t answer on its own are routed to Crescendo’s customer service professionals.

There are several competing chatbots on the market that can process support tickets without manual input. However, they usually don’t provide access to a team of human support representatives, which means companies have to build a contact center team from scratch. Crescendo says its service removes that requirement and thereby shortens the initial setup process from months to days.

The AI assistant at the core of the offering is powered by large language models that companies can train on their internal knowledge repositories. A retailer, for example, could supply the chatbot with merchandise data from its e-commerce catalog. Crescendo can then use that information to automatically answer shoppers’ product questions. 

Companies may customize the style in which the assistant generates responses based on their internal marketing policies. For organizations with an international customer base, Crescendo provides the ability to translate chatbot responses into more than 50 languages. 

Besides answering product questions from online shoppers, the company’s platform also supports several other customer service use cases. A software maker could configure Crescendo’s AI to help users with troubleshooting requests. E-commerce companies, in turn, can use it to provide package shipping updates and process product return requests.

Crescendo’s platform ships with a quality evaluation tool that promises to improve the quality of its AI-generated responses over time. Additionally, the software generates a quality score for every customer interaction. If the score indicates that a support ticket wasn’t processed efficiently, companies receive an account credit that can be used to purchase customer support capacity.

The company says its platform can save a significant amount of time for contact center teams. It says the built-in AI assistant helps some organizations answer more than 90% of pre-sales inquiries without human input. The software can also process a sizable portion of a company’s technical support tickets. 

In conjunction today’s funding announcement, Crescendo disclosed that it has acquired Boise, Idaho-based business services provider PartnerHero. It offers, among other things, a customer service solution that helps organizations field support requests.

“Our value proposition is to offer a full stack contact center solution with outcome-driven pricing,” said Crescendo co-founder and President Anand Chandrasekaran. “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 joins the growing list of startups that have raised funding in recent months to make contact centers more efficient using AI. In July, IntelePeer Cloud Communications LLC raised $140 million for a machine learning platform that automates repetitive customer support tasks. A few weeks earlier, Level AI Inc. nabbed a $39.4 million round backed by Battery Ventures and other institutional investors. 

Photo: Crescendo