Cresta Chat Platform
Transform any agent into an expert
We designed an AI-powered solution to enhance chat agents' workflows, reducing the complexity of managing multiple concurrent conversations. This resulted in a significant boost to agent performance and became Cresta’s first core product.
Vision
Enhance chat agents’ workflows and improve their performance.
Problem to be solved:
Managing multiple concurrent conversations is overwhelming, especially for new agents.
Business need:
Demonstrate AI's effectiveness in boosting agent performance.
My role:
End-to-end design leadership and solution launch.
Outcome:
Significantly reduced conversation handling time, becoming Cresta's first core product.
Learning:
Intuitive design reduces AI anxiety and enables seamless workflow integration.
Key Challenges
1. Closing the Performance Gap
A small elite group of agents consistently outperformed their peers while new hires faced steep learning curves. This led to a perpetual cycle of underperformance and turnover.
We needed to democratize expert insights to elevate team-wide performance.
2. Enhancing Efficiency Under Pressure
Agents juggling multiple real-time conversations experienced heavy cognitive load, leading to inconsistent performance. When focusing on one conversation, others would suffer.
We needed to optimize workflows to help agents manage this pressure while maintaining quality across all interactions.
Identified Problems
Problem 1: Overwhelming Cognitive Load
Agents face an intense cognitive burden, often juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. This can quickly lead to feelings of overwhelm, impacting performance and decision-making.
Problem 2: Lack of Visibility
Clear, real-time visibility into all ongoing conversations is crucial for agents to manage their workload effectively and prioritize where their attention is most needed.
Problem 3: No comprehensive skill development
Agents need structured, purposeful learning opportunities to improve. Without clear guidance, they risk operating aimlessly, hindering their ability to grow into true experts.
These insights shaped our approach, focusing on solutions that reduce cognitive load, enhance workflow transparency, and support skill mastery.
From a client site visit in 2019
UX Design Goals
🔤 😉
Create a Simple and Intuitive Platform
Despite Cresta's advanced AI capabilities, we prioritized a natural, easy-to-use foundation. This allowed agents to focus on problem-solving rather than navigating complex interfaces.
💡🪄
Seamlessly Integrate AI Assistance
We incorporated real-time AI support directly into existing workflows, ensuring agents received benefits without feeling burdened by additional technology.
Solution 1: Improved Usability
General upgrade to the UI was required. Here are the main changes:
Unified Conversation View
Replaced tab-based interfaces with a single, comprehensive view of all active conversations.
This user-requested change provided better context, reduced missed interactions, and empowered agents to manage multiple chats effectively.
Personalized Workspace
Made the platform where agents spend most of their day both accessible and customizable.
Added color-coded conversations, custom chat names, notification sounds, background options, and dark mode to improve usability while creating moments of delight.
Solution 2: Real-Time AI Assistance
The real-time assistance can be provided in different levels.
Quick Comparison between Suggestions and Hints
Ready-to-Send Suggestions
Provided AI-generated, contextually accurate responses that agents could send with a single click.
Initially faced adoption challenges, but our beta program with top agents helped refine the experience. Agents progressed from manually copying responses to embracing one-click solutions that automatically included personalized elements like visitor names, eliminating the need for memorized macros.
Behavioral Coaching Hints
Implemented subtle nudges promoting best practices in specific scenarios (like addressing sales objections).
Unlike immediate-use Suggestions, Hints developed lasting skills—critical in an industry with high turnover and limited training resources. We identified key behaviors from successful conversations and used them as the foundation for real-time coaching, enhancing agent development while on the job.
Impact
Measurable Performance Gains
At Intuit, agents achieved an 82% conversion increase with ramp time reduced from seven months to five weeks.
Cox agents outperformed peers within six weeks, generating an additional $25.52 revenue per chat.
Foundation for Company Growth
Successfully building this solution from 0 to 1 demonstrated its transformative potential. These results propelled our expansion beyond chat to voice interactions—the dominant contact center channel.
Next Steps
Complete Performance Ecosystem
Real-time assistance represented just one component of our vision. We completed the cycle by developing Opera, allowing leaders to define key outcomes.
This created a continuous improvement loop: Opera set goals, AI Studio analyzed patterns, agents received coaching via Suggestions and Hints, and leaders tracked progress through analytics. The result was a data-driven performance system that continuously evolved.