Balto CEO Marc Bernstein took to social media today to cheer on his fast growing team for having customers use the call center platform for 100 million calls. Everyone loves round numbers, and that’s a very big one, but the 4thEst8 asked Bernstein what this kind of engagement means to the business… and when he first saw it coming. Here’s a transcript.
Marc Bernstein, Balto CEO
“We have guided more sales and customer service conversations in real time than any other company on Earth. That’s a huge validation for the market, the real time guidance market that we’re building, it’s huge validation for the products and change validation for the company. And when we see signals like this, from the market, that people in mass are adopting real time guidance to drive more revenue and better customer outcomes, that inspires us to invest more in research and development… inspires us to advance the next generation of real time guidance, and reminds us that there’s a huge market opportunity here,” Bernstein said.
Balto’s software uses AI to help call center agents. It monitors their phone conversations with customers, and pops useful and pertinent information up on the screen so the agent can more quickly address the problem at hand. Bernstein says a series of A-B tests more than two years ago was the first indication that rapid growth was possible.
“We started launching live A-B tests with our customers, where we would have a new customer, and half of their agents would be using Balto and the other half would not. And we were able to show with a statistically significant degree that consistently the Balto users would outperform the non-Balto users. Their sales conversations would regularly be 20% higher, their ability to handle calls would regularly be 10 to 15% faster, and their customer satisfaction scores would be, you know, eight to 10 points higher… that was where we knew that it was time to pour gas on the fire,” said Bernstein.
The company’s LinkedIn page boasts about 145 employees, up by nearly 100 from a year ago. And there are 28 job openings advertised on the site right now.
Last fall the company grew to more than 100 workers, and moved out of it’s space at T-Rex in St. Louis to it’s own offices in downtown St. Louis. The company raised more than $51.8M, most recently closing a Series B in August, 2021 for $37.5M led by Stripes and joined by RingCentral Ventures. In Oct. 2020 their $10M Series A was led by Sierra Ventures with Jump Capital, OCA Ventures, Cultivation Capital and others participating. Balto previously raised $4.2M in a pair of seed rounds, plus $50K from the Arch Grants in 2018.
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We are working with Balto right now. Hoping we can work something out to see how this xan help our folks and our business.