St. Louis startup Balto is now offering it’s flagship call center support software in Spanish.
“Greater language access broadens your reach, locally and globally,” James Klein, the St. Louis based publisher of InSpanish Media, the parent company of Dario Digital Noticias, a Spanish language news and information source, told bizblip. “The return on investment of having a language strategy, especially in Spanish, is significant in any product or service with a well expressed value proposition.”
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.
“Language diversity is never a bad thing and can also be a lucrative and often overlooked market so startups with a product or service that would be useful in the Spanish community or elsewhere should think about marketing to those places as well,” BusinessRiff ‘concierge’ Mary Scott, a business consultant, told bizblip. “You want to make sure that the messages you use are culturally relevant and sensitive to misinterpretation.”
“We have an expert look at the copy to avoid cultural traps,” Dan Klein, partner at Spoke! marketing (and advisory board member to bizblip) said, “Translation software does a pretty good job but we hire translation experts and editors to make sure.”
The company grew to around 160 employees in 2022 but cut back to around 130 this summer. Last fall it 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.
Full disclosure: Balto is a sponsor of the Sept. 2022 ‘Pitches Get Stitches’ pitch competition, a News Lab Inc. property. News Lab Inc. owns bizblip.
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