Crescendo, creators of the first augmented-AI customer experience (CX) platform, announced the acquisition of PartnerHero, a leader in CX innovation with customers such as Airtable, Khan Academy, sweetgreen, Tom’s Shoes, Udemy and more. Price and terms of the deal were not disclosed. The combined companies aim to disrupt an estimated half trillion dollar plus market opportunity.
The acquisition is the largest ever in high technology by an early-stage company and the company today also announced that it had raised $50 million in venture funding over the past year. Crescendo assembled a seasoned leadership and proved out its innovative augmented-AI approach to customer experience so that the 20-person company can start to immediately drive enterprise scale through acquisitions, adding over 200 customers and 3,000 human-in-the-loop CX professionals with PartnerHero.
For the last twenty years, customer service technology has focused on deflection (making it difficult for customers to reach customer service) as a way to save costs. Now with augmented AI, companies can increase customer engagement while also reducing costs. Uniquely, Crescendo only gets paid by outcomes it delivers – a departure from the multi-decade policy of charging for labor, something that misaligns the interests of traditional CX providers and their enterprise customers.
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Crescendo shipped its first AI-augmented platform solution in 2023 and since then has experienced zero customer downtime in production. PartnerHero is a recognized industry leader in customer service and now their clients will get access to the premier augmented-AI platform for CX.
“We are excited to accelerate the adoption of augmented AI in the customer service industry by bringing together the best AI technology and the best customer service team,” said Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo. “Our unique value proposition is that we can increase customer engagement and lower costs by offering a full-stack solution. PartnerHero sets the gold standard for customer service. We’re delighted to bring augmented AI to a much larger audience. And for CIOs, they can show immediate ROI on AI investments.”
A key insight shared by both companies is that if you want to deliver the highest quality of service you need the well-orchestrated combination of AI and humans. AI frees up human agents to focus on more complex and high-value problems.
“While our competitors have struggled to adapt to the rise of AI in customer experience, PartnerHero decided early on to lean into the change,” said Shervin Talieh, CEO of PartnerHero who will join the leadership team led by Crescendo CEO Matt Price. “In Crescendo, we found a partner who accelerates our transformation toward blended software and services, enabling outcome-based models for our customers. This unlocks new opportunities not only for the world-class brands we support but also for our thousands of global employees who will play a leading role in this evolution.”
Crescendo delivers a full-technology stack combining the most advanced Large Learning Models (LLM) with proprietary technology to ensure quality and accuracy of all customer interactions. As a result, customers are able to go into production in as little as two weeks without the risk of “hallucination” which has been a problem with many AI technologies.
SOURCE: GlobeNewsWire