Crescendo raises $50 million for AI-powered customer service platform

Customer service startup Crescendo today announced It said it closed a $50 million financing round at a $500 million valuation.

General Catalyst led the Series C investment. Celesta Capital, Alorica and several angel investors also participated.

Its official name is CrescendoAI Inc. Crescendo provides a customer support service that eliminates the need for companies to establish their own contact centers. The service uses the AI ​​assistant CX Assistant to answer simple queries. More complex requests that the AI ​​cannot answer on its own are routed to Crescendo’s customer service experts.

There are several competing chatbots on the market that can handle support tickets without manual input. However, they typically do not provide access to a team of human support representatives; This means companies must build a contact center team from scratch. Crescendo says its service eliminates this requirement, reducing the initial setup process from months to days.

The artificial intelligence assistant at the center of the offering is powered by large language models that companies can train in their own internal knowledge stores. For example, a retailer can provide the chatbot with product data from its e-commerce catalog. Crescendo can then use this information to automatically answer shoppers’ product questions.

Companies can customize the assistant’s response generation style based on their internal marketing policies. Crescendo provides the ability to translate chatbot responses into more than 50 languages ​​for organizations with an international customer base.

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

Crescendo’s platform comes with a quality assessment tool that promises to improve the quality of AI-generated answers over time. Additionally, the software creates a quality score for each customer interaction. If the score indicates that the support ticket was not handled efficiently, companies receive an account credit that can be used to purchase customer support capacity.

The company says its platform can save contact center teams a significant amount of time. It says its built-in AI assistant has helped some organizations answer more than 90% of pre-sales questions without human input. The software can also handle the majority of a company’s technical support tickets.

With today’s financing announcement, Crescendo announced the acquisition of Boise, Idaho-based business services provider PartnerHero. Among other things, it offers a customer service solution that helps organizations handle support requests.

“Our value proposition is to offer a full-service contact center solution with results-oriented pricing,” said Crescendo co-founder and President Anand Chandrasekaran. “This recommendation was driven by our insight that AI offers a unique ‘why now’ moment to address a 20-year mismatch in serving and charging customers in the call center industry.”

Crescendo joins a growing list of startups that have raised funds in recent months to make contact centers more efficient using artificial intelligence. IntelePeer Cloud Communications LLC in July raised $140 million for a machine learning platform that automates repetitive customer support tasks. A few weeks ago Level AI Inc. caught A $39.4 million round backed by Battery Ventures and other institutional investors.

Photo: “Crescendo”