Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a voice agent customer experience operating system. The announcement comes just days after Salesforce announced it would be buying logistics supplier Rune Technologies and marketing giant Braze.
Cresta, which has more than 500 employees, provides voice agents that resolve customer calls end-to-end, and a platform that gives human representatives real-time guidance by analyzing interactions. Let’s take a look at what the deal means.
‘Voice Is Where Service Is Hardest to Get Right’
Salesforce name-drops Marriott, Comcast, and Alaska Airlines as brands that use Cresta’s voice agents, which are said to “hold natural, real-time conversations” and “handle interruptions”.
The platform tests and improves voice agents and coaches human representatives.
Salesforce says that important insights from customer conversations are too often trapped in silos, disconnected from customer context and the tools teams use to act.
As voice agents are given responsibility for tackling more complex interactions, businesses should “connect every insight” to the customer to drive outcomes, Salesforce says.
Salesforce provides the customer history and the systems to get work done, while Cresta will bring a deep understanding of every conversation and the ability to drive action with voice agents, the CRM company said.
“Together with Service Cloud, businesses will be able to connect every conversation to the customer and to the outcome it drives: resolution, retention and revenue,” Salesforce said in a statement.
After the transaction closes, Cresta will continue supporting contact center and telephony platforms its customers currently use, the company added.
Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce and Service Cloud, Salesforce, said: “Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers.
“Cresta has built voice agents that handle complex, high-volume calls for some of the world’s largest brands. As more service is resolved in the conversation itself, together we’ll bring the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place.”
Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta, said: “Cresta’s mission is to turn every customer interaction into a competitive advantage for our customers through a single agentic operating system for customer experience. Through unparalleled innovation, we’ve achieved that goal with some of the world’s largest companies.
“Now, by uniting our platform with Salesforce, we will realize our full vision at scale, embedding real-time conversation intelligence and agentic experiences directly into Salesforce’s first-class customer service Platform.”
Final Thoughts
It’s yet another Salesforce acquisition. This time, it’s more voice capabilities, bringing Cresta’s customer service voice agents into the fold. This is a clear strategic fit for Salesforce, which no doubt wants to make Agentforce as powerful as possible.
This is the third acquisition announcement from Salesforce in two weeks. Following its deals with Rune and Braze, the Cresta news only strengthens the theory that Salesforce is willing to spend aggressively to strengthen its AI position.
