Software August 19, 2021

Conversational Excellence: Our Investment in Balto

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Balto blog

Phone calls are one of the few times that customers directly engage with a company, and yet these critical moments are often frustrating with long hold times, poor sales experiences, and roundabout answers.

Contact center agents have a challenging job as they navigate a wide variety of questions and situations that pop up on calls and are expected to quickly deliver accurate answers. To help them, contact centers hire managers who listen to a small sample of calls and steer agents toward best practices using in-person training, handbooks, and other legacy methods. The average 500 agent contact center spends $2 million per year on training and agents inevitably forget recommendations on live calls and struggle to navigate a binder of information that is often hundreds of pages long.

Agents need a product that can help them keep up with customers’ expectations for a smooth and seamless call. This is true now more than ever as the rise of chat-based customer support for simple issues has made phone interactions increasingly difficult to resolve.

Balto's solution

Balto is a real-time guidance platform that scales excellent conversations across an entire contact center. As agents conduct sales and support calls, Balto listens to both sides of the conversation and shows agents the best things to say live on the call. Balto’s playbooks guide agents step-by-step and dynamic prompts automatically surface rebuttals, suggestions, and compliance statements so that agents can course correct mid-call and deliver a better experience for the customer. Customers compare it to having a manager on every call.

Further, Balto’s learning engine captures strategies the best agents use and flags these to managers so they can easily measure what’s working and scale it instantly. This is an incredibly tricky technical problem to solve and the Balto team has leaned on leading techniques in AI, NLP, and automated speech recognition to tackle it.

We were blown away by Balto’s results and customer feedback. By steering agents toward best practices, Balto’s platform boosts sales conversions, speeds up support resolutions, and decreases agent ramp time. Customers see sales conversions increase by over 20% and have called Balto “call center magic” and “a dream come true.”


Real-time guidance is the ‘Holy Grail’ of contact center.

Stripes Leads Balto's $37.5 M Series B Financing

Stripes is excited to partner with Balto as they define the real-time guidance category. At Stripes, we look for products that are a leap forward for the category and Balto is having an impact that contact centers previously didn’t believe was possible.

Balto’s founders, Marc and Chris, have a broad vision to reinvent how contact centers think about and drive performance. Before real-time guidance, managers had limited visibility into what happens on calls and their impact on KPIs. Balto’s insights into every conversation allow contact centers to become truly data-driven for the first time. That data allows Balto to not only direct agents to relevant playbooks, but also continuously improve playbooks based on performance.

As the former CMO of RingCentral, Stripes Operating Partner Riadh Dridi is deeply familiar with the problem space and customer base that Balto serves. He immediately recognized that Balto is solving a challenging problem with an elegant solution. We’re also thrilled to welcome RingCentral as an investor in the round.

Balto has built a culture around people development which shines through in their company culture and drive to help agents reach their full potential. We’re just scratching the surface of real-time and ready to get to work. Welcome to the Stripes family!


Balto blog