On average only 5-7% of customers respond to surveys, and this figure continues to drop. This means over 90% customers are essentially ignored. These are the customers that are likely to churn without ever telling you why.
Solving this problem, according to Head of Product, Josh Levin, is one of Cresta AI’s main missions. “Because we work across calls, emails, and chats, we can analyse the total customer journey to find where the real problems are. Traditionally, companies saw a 5% response rate on surveys. Using the data already living in their conversations, we now predict CSAT and NPS for 100% of their calls. This allows them to close the loop with every customer based on far more meaningful and comprehensive data than old-school surveys could ever provide.”
Cresta is an enterprise-grade artificial intelligence platform designed to integrate generative AI into contact centre workflows. While CCaaS providers such as Amazon, Five9, Genesys focus on the ‘pipes’ and telephony, Cresta focuses on the Intelligence Layer.
Levin comments, “Essentially, we use AI to unlock the true potential of the contact centre and deliver better customer experiences. Our focus is on using AI to optimise human potential while providing a unified platform for AI agents. Our product is built around three questions: How do you optimise a human? How do you provide AI agents to solve the problems they are better suited for? And how do you provide visibility across the entire customer journey? In our view, having that end-to-end data is what allows you to power the best possible experiences for both humans and AI agents.”
Cresta’s capabilities include:
- AI agents (automation): Intelligent bots that handle routine, high-volume inquiries (chat, voice, email). Unlike basic chatbots, these are trained on your company’s best human conversations and can escalate to humans with full context.
- Agent assist (augmentation): Real-time coaching for human agents. It provides live suggestions, ‘smart Compose’ typing assistance, behavioural coaching (e.g., “you’re speaking too fast”), and instant knowledge retrieval during live calls.
- Conversation intelligence (analytics): Analyses 100% of interactions—not just the 5% that fill out surveys. It uses predictive CSAT and NPS to identify sentiment across the entire customer base, uncovering the ‘unheard majority’.
- Agent operations center (supervision): A unified command hub launched in late 2025. It allows human supervisors to monitor a hybrid workforce of both humans and AI agents, intervening in risky or high-emotion interactions instantly.
“Our original focus was really about how to make humans better. We started in the early days of transformer models—well before ChatGPT—using smaller versions of LLMs to make agents as effective as possible. We looked at three key areas: How do you deliver knowledge to them in real time? How do you automate the summary of their after-call work? And how do you provide behavioral guidance to them during the conversation itself?”
The future roadmap
Cresta’s product roadmap prioritises the rollout of generative AI within enterprise contact centres through a unified, ‘human-centric’ platform that integrates AI and human agents. Bolstered by a $125 million funding round in late 2024, the company is channeling resources into R&D, scaling its global presence, and introducing advanced features for automation, multi-language support, and operational oversight.
Levin comments, “The reason Cresta is being adopted so rapidly is because we do more than just build tools and release them into the wild. It’s not just about launching an AI agent and walking away; it’s about answering the question: How do you actually run an enterprise-scale contact center in this new world?”
“That is what our customers are really asking us. They know we can automate, augment, and analyse, but they want to know what the next five years look like when you have humans AI agents working together”, he adds.
Cresta’s strategy is to avoid becoming a full-fledged, all-in-one Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, and instead focus on being the ‘intelligence layer’ on top of existing platforms.
The contact centre intelligence layer
The contact centre is often seen as a cost centre—a place where customers go only when something has gone wrong. But according to Cresta’s future roadmap, the goal isn’t just to manage these interactions, but to fundamentally categorise, optimise, and even eliminate the need for them.
According to Levin many calls shouldn’t happen at all. “If a customer is calling because a self-serve flow is broken, the priority isn’t a better conversation—it’s fixing the website. Cresta uses conversational data to identify these pain points, allowing companies to remove unnecessary costs and frustration at the source’.
Over the next year, Cresta is leaning heavily into the Customer Journey. By analysing every touchpoint—from the first chat to the follow-up email—the platform aims to provide a unified AI layer that identifies gaps in service and highlights specific customer segments for better targeting.
The goal is clear: a contact centre that doesn’t just answer phones, but one that uses every word spoken to build a more efficient, empathetic, and data-driven business.
Cresta in Australia and Asia Pacific
Cresta is actively expanding its footprint in Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, targeting high-growth opportunities for AI-driven contact centre solutions. Cresta has appointed Andrew Cannington as General Manager of APAC, based in the new Melbourne office, to lead the regional growth strategy.
Cannington comments, “We are in an enviable position, possessing an extraordinary product at exactly the right moment. Having spent years in this industry and led various companies, I’ve seen this transition firsthand: what was once a long-standing promise is finally a reality. The technology is here, it is proven, and it is operating at scale”.
“As a result, everyone wants to be part of this conversation. We are currently attracting premier talent from across the technology sector, with professionals from the world’s leading companies applying for roles across our sales, partnership, and technical teams”.
The company employs a hybrid go-to-market strategy across APAC, balancing direct sales with strategic partnerships based on regional market maturity. Cresta is appointing regional partnership leadership to formalise and accelerate the ecosystem across Australia and APAC.
Cannington says, “We’ve taken a deliberately nuanced approach across APAC and our global markets, balancing direct sales and partnerships based on the maturity and dynamics of each region. In Australia specifically, our initial priority has been establishing a strong direct-to-enterprise motion”.
“Over the past nine months, we’ve focused on building enterprise sales, marketing, and SDR capabilities to secure our first flagship customers and establish market credibility. In parallel, we’ve been actively developing our partner ecosystem – working with systems integrators, BPOs, and technology partners – and identifying those with both the capability and appetite to scale at pace with us”.
Following the acquisition of initial Australian clients, the company is establishing a localised customer success and implementation ecosystem. This expansion includes regional specialists and technical resources tailored for enterprise deployments. These Australian operations are further integrated into a 24/7 global support model to ensure continuous service coverage.
