Can AI Improve Customer Service Without Killing Jobs? Crescendo Thinks So
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There is a term in CX called deflection and containment. Most bot companies are talking about containment as if consumers are some kind of virus that you can't let near your organization. If I am allowed to speak to a human, then I know that that's a costly resource for you and you're really going out of your way to make that connection with me. Whether it's handled by the AI or the human, we only get paid when we solve that outcome and we never charge a customer if it was a negative customer experience because we can do that now. To make AI work and automation work, being incredibly flexible about where you inject people and then continually evolving that is a valuable service. Innovation in customer care is going to become as important as innovation in product.
Bigger than anything since maybe the introduction of the telephone.
What if your customer service team could handle 90% of tickets automatically with 99.8% accuracy and still feel human? Today, we're talking to the guy building exactly that. Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron Podcast. I'm Grant Harvey, writer of The Neuron Newsletter, and today I'm talking to Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo AI. Matt spent over 13 years at Zendesk helping build one of the biggest names in customer service software, and now he's betting that AI plus humans together will beat AI alone. I like that concept, so I'm excited to chat with him about how he's doing exactly that. Matt, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Grant. Great to be here.
Awesome. So Matt, I want to start with the macro context to kind of set the stage. We often hear that customer service and coding are probably the two biggest jobs, most in the crosshairs of AI automation, right? And coding has seen incredible gains over the past year. So I'm curious, what about customer service? You started Crescendo back in 2024 after you left Zendex Labs. So how has the tech progressed since you started Crescendo and where would you say we are now?
Without doubt, the introduction of LLMs is just such a major shift in customer care and the ability to do customer care. Bigger than anything since maybe the introduction of the telephone, where people can communicate with businesses. And there's been lots of incremental steps before then, but there really have been just that, small incremental changes. LLMs really create a world of abundance in CX. You know, the first time things are not constrained and businesses can open up the door to the interaction. The problem is, is that at this stage, we're still at the early days where most AI is being bolted on to an old process. And whereas actually what really needs to happen is the whole process or the whole of the customer experience process needs to be reinvented from the bottom up and become AI native.
That's what we've been focused on. And so in an era of, you know, a lot of noise around AI bots, we've taken a different approach and we've created an AI native approach where we think about solving the problem right from the, when a customer starts the conversation right through to the escalation and when the customer's issue is resolved.
That's awesome. That's awesome. So as far as like how much of the customer service process can actually be automated today versus a year ago, like I guess what does Crescendo do specifically? Like we could start there and then talk about how you use AI in your process and how that just, I guess, affects the larger industry and how the larger industry is using it.
Yeah, so we have AI agents or assistants, as we call them, and they can interact with customers on any channel, such as voice, chat, email, and also provide assistance to agents. And in fact, we've just launched something that's quite unique called multimodal AI, where we can actually do all of those things all at once within a chat window. And it has some pretty innovative use cases that we can explore further. So we provide all of those aspects, but uniquely, we can also forward deploy expertise to work alongside the AI, whether it's anything from a knowledge manager, a QA manager, all the things that companies might not necessarily be set up to do.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:21
2
How are LLMs transforming customer service?
10:21–18:31
3
Why does Crescendo emphasize a human-AI collaboration?
18:31–19:40
4
What unique features does Crescendo's multimodal AI offer?
19:40–25:48
5
How does outcome-based pricing improve customer satisfaction?
25:48–39:43
6
What roles will customer service professionals play in the future?
39:43–53:45
7
How is AI reshaping the customer experience industry?
53:45–57:12
Speakers
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