Redefine how people and machines work together with Balto.
Balto offers real time guidance, coaching, and QA to unite agents with AI for conversations that deliver results!
Featuring:
Chris Kontes, Chief Operating Officer at Balto
TRANSCRIPT
Can you tell us about the company?
My name is Chris Kontes I am the COO and one of the founders at Balto. Balto was founded because myself and one of our other founders, Marck, were salespeople in the previous life. And we were frustrated with how much great coaching that we received that we would not necessarily put back into practice. And we felt like we could do a better job taking all the great lessons that were for us and using them, and it’s hard in a cold call or if someone is frustrated, whatever it might be to remember all the little details from your coaching. And we felt the pain of hanging up a call that could have gone a lot better, that we blew it because we didn’t remember our scripting or our training, whatever it might be. So we thought, wouldn’t it be cool?, and this is the short answer, but only because a computer could help us along in our conversations. And that’s sort of the genesis for the Balto idea. Balto today, first and foremost, understands conversations and in real time tells contact center agents what to say so that they can have the most successful call that they can.
Can you tell us some history about the company?
Yeah, we were founded in 2017 and today we’re a series B company, about 135 people. We’ve raised a little over $50 million and we’ve done about 150 guided calls guided in real time.
Can you tell us about the technology your company uses?
I think sort of the coolest part of our technology is the speech recognition. We build all of that in-house, so everything is customized for different customers, different types of industries and things like that. We do some very interesting analysis on the speech transcription. We also have some tone and some sentiment things that we’re doing. Then we’re able actually to run this all in a couple hundred milliseconds and our servers and send the suggestion back down. So we’re piping 100% of conversations up into the cloud, running all this analysis and sending the suggestion back down to the agent all almost instantaneously. And it’s been a huge technological undertaking and certainly very distinctive and probably to probably the accomplishment honestly, we’re most proud of as a company is that we’re able to wire this stuff together in a way that actually works well.
What is your unique solution?
Real time guidance is is still unique in the industry. The ability to take 100% of a contact center’s conversations and in real time understand what’s happening enough that we can give an agent a helpful recommendation almost instantly is brand new, and it’s an early industry in its infancy with a ton of potential ahead of it. But up until recently, the idea of the computing power one would need to run all of that analysis in real time made it really not economical. But with cloud services and other things, we’d been able to bring that down to a price point where we can do those things for people so that what we call real time guidance is still our bread and butter. We have a real time coaching game-ification, different results of reporting, all things we’re very proud of. But the real time guidance is, is still our bread and butter and what everything else is predicated on.
Any advice for others in the Mar-Tech space?
We do a lot of agents, surveys of agents in the Mar-Tech industry and others. As a quick aside, all of those surveys are available a ball to index on our website. But top agents routinely outperform in self-motivation and desire to grow in their role. And those are the two motivators beyond pay or like traditional sales scale or like other characteristics you might imagine somebody could have in a role like this. So a lot of it comes from from within. And that’s why I think tools like Balto are so cool because they show an investment in someone’s progress and they work really nicely for people who are motivated by those types of things intrinsically.
