Crescendo is reshaping the future of customer experience. Rather than offering just another AI tool or chatbot, Crescendo delivers a fully managed, end-to-end customer service platform that blends advanced generative AI with expert human support. Pulse 2.0 sat down with CEO Matt Price to learn how the company is redefining CX performance and accelerating results for leading brands.
Matt Price’s Background
What is Matt Price’s background? Price said:
“I’ve been in the CX industry for 15 years, with a long run at Zendesk from its early days, where I built the European business. I later ran Marketing and helped Zendesk manage the acquisition of several products. In the last few years, I ran the Zendesk customer service organization. In fact, I started my career by doing UK customer support for a software company in California.”
“So I’ve seen a lot of technology waves over the years. The move to client/server, the widespread adoption of the internet, mobile devices, and now AI. I think AI has the potential to be the biggest change yet.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Price shared:
“Andy Lee, the founder of Alorica, and Anand Chandrasekaran, who was at General Catalyst then, hatched the idea of applying AI to customer service. But instead of just building another CX bot, we wanted to build an entire platform and offer a fully managed service. Our unique viewpoint is that AI by itself isn’t sufficient. You can’t just build an AI solution and throw it over the wall. There’s a lot of care that needs to be taken to make sure the AI has guardrails and is continuously updated and tuned. So we offer AI as a complete managed service. You don’t need to hire a team of AI experts, that’s what we do.”
“We built a founding team around this vision that included me, Slava Zhakarov, our CTO, Tod Famous, our Chief Product Officer, and a small but competent engineering group. We’ve expanded since then, but the core team remains.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Price reflected:
“In October, we announced two interesting moves. We raised $50 million from General Catalyst and others and announced that we acquired PartnerHero, a 3,000-person contact center company. For a startup of twenty people, this was an ambitious move. But now, six months later, we can confidently say it’s accelerated our growth. We have brought in AI for dozens of customers and are achieving results in just weeks. Not only are we saving customers money, but we’re increasing engagement with their clients.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Price explained:
“We offer a complete AI platform for CX as a service. So, we have our omnichannel AI assistants that can respond to customer service requests over email, voice, and online chat. We cover all the channels. We also integrate with whatever systems the customer has: Zendesk, Salesforce, Kustomer, Amazon Connect, Genesys Cloud, Gorgias, Shopify, etc.”
“One of the most important things we can do for our customers is something we call the CX Data Assistant. It’s a conversational AI interface that enables CX managers to pull insights, in real-time, from all the customer incidents, no matter where they are coming in. Whether it’s over voice, chat, email, whatever. We can analyze all of it in real time and give the CX manager insights that give him or her a seat at the executive table. How’s our new product launch working? Are customers finding what they need on the site? What’s causing a spike in returns?”
“Many CX teams are reactive, constantly in fire-fighting mode. By having AI take on some of the more mundane, repetitive tasks, we can give the CX manager tools and time to do more proactive analysis that can drive improvements to the business.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Price and the team faced in building the company? Price acknowledged:
“We’re a startup, so there are always challenges. And we then combined with a much larger company. But I’m happy to say that it’s been a great experience and gives us a much faster growth trajectory than we would have otherwise.”
“I think there’s still some healthy skepticism about AI. I can understand the perspective of customers who are cautious. But if you’re running a CX organization, you can’t put your head in the sand and wait it out. You want to look for opportunities to adopt AI, put it to use, and start seeing results and positive outcomes as fast as possible.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Price noted:
“Since our initial launch, we’ve added omnichannel support, even more integrations, and added new Agentic AI capabilities to interface with the various integrations and backend systems our customers use, like ordering systems and CRM, which achieves an impressive 99.8% accuracy in responses. We’ve also added enhanced data analytics, business insights, and automated QA.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Price cited:
“Most notable would be the closing of our $50 million Series C with General Catalyst in October 2024 and the acquisition of PartnerHero. It was a bold move for a 20-person team to acquire a 3000+ person BPO, and it has worked out very well. We have dozens of major customers in production already, with many more going into production soon.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Price about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We’ve had great success with a range of customers in retail, ecommerce, connected devices, consumer products, and more. Sometimes, the more complex the product, the better we can do by applying AI. If you’re trying to troubleshoot the configuration of a complicated electronic device, that’s right up our alley. AI can guide customers through this process better than humans, because it has the entire knowledge base at its fingertips and can diagnose just about any problem out there.”
“For example, Rachio brought us in in advance of their summer surge to help ensure they could deal with the seasonal spikes that happen every year. Not only did we save them money on staffing to seasonal capacity, but we’re also able to handle many highly complex questions easily, to walk their customers through just about any technical issue. Rachio stayed under budget and boosted self-service rates while seeing a 30% reduction in cost savings.”
“We did a similar project for a major footwear retailer around Black Friday last year, handling a 5x spike in customer service requests easily. Customers got their answers fast, and it reduced the service backlog compared to prior years.”
Funding/Revenue
When asking Price about the company’s funding and revenue details, he revealed:
“As mentioned, we’ve raised $50 million from General Catalyst and others. We’re a private company, so we don’t disclose revenues. That said, unlike many AI companies, or startups in general, we are growing and cash-flow positive.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Price assessed:
“It’s always hard to gauge these things, but broadly speaking, the outsourced call center industry is about $400 billion. If you add in-house call centers, it’s probably closer to 700 billion. That’s a huge market, which is why it’s captured the interest of so many companies.”
“But there are so many companies chasing this market, we know they can’t all be winners. We differentiate ourselves by delivering customer results in as fast as four weeks and providing a fully managed service. So you don’t need to hire a team of AI experts to build and maintain the system. We take care of all of that for you.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Price affirmed:
“There are lots of companies that can offer a point solution AI bot for customer service. Honestly, most of them are terrible. Any time I find myself interacting with these first-generation tools, I find myself wanting to throw my laptop against the wall. They’re built on the old school view that deflection is king. Keep those customers away from my customer service team! If that’s your view of AI for CX, you’re destined to fail.”
“Today’s customers expect a 24×7 service model on any channel they want, at any time they choose. Companies should be thinking about how to use AI for engagement, not deflection.”
“We can give customers a much better experience, shorter wait times, and more accurate answers than any existing CX team can provide, because it’s augmented with AI. We use AI where we can, but we also put guardrails in place so that there’s a smooth handoff to human interaction when required. Our AI will never hallucinate or make up new policies on the fly, which we’ve seen in the news recently.”
“We’ve done it for dozens of customers already, in ecommerce, retail, apparel, connected devices, health care, and beyond.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Price emphasized:
“The acquisition of PartnerHero has been immensely successful, so we’re looking ahead to making more BPO acquisitions. Our customers, and ultimately the end user or consumer, still want and need to have humans in the loop to resolve certain service issues that the AI can’t and manage and enhance the AI components themselves. We are continuing to add new integrations and improve the service based on customers’ needs and to support new markets and regions.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Price concluded:
“We see a lot of other AI projects failing because too many businesses are not investing in guardrails, committing to the maintenance that AI systems require, and fine-tuning. It seems like many folks are under pressure to show that they’re using AI, but most simply aren’t equipped. While most AI implementations take 6-12 months, Crescendo customers are up and running in production within weeks.”
“The human element of our AI CX approach is key, and we refer to this as Augmented AI. Human insight and empathy are irreplaceable. Crescendo brings the most accurate AI to customer service, handles the mundane aspects of that work, and allows the customer service professionals to focus on complex, value-added interactions.”
“There’s a lot of concern out there about AI taking away jobs, but we are seeing the opposite – Crescendo is actually creating more jobs, and is actively upskilling and training customer service representatives to become effective, skilled AI practitioners.”
