Built By and For Contact Center Agents and Managers

In 2017, friends Marc Bernstein and Chris Kontes worked alongside one another in telesales. Like any greenhorns in sales, when objections arose on calls, they forgot their training in the heat of the moment. Sales were lost and it was an endless cycle of re-training and lost calls. Rinse and repeat.

Out of this frustration, Marc created a macro in Excel that allowed him to type in an objection during calls, and Excel would pull up a pre-written response. This helped Marc navigate each call much easier. When Chris learned of this macro, he knew Marc was onto something.

Through continued development and refinement, the small, homegrown macro solution that assisted Marc on his calls evolved into what would become an entire new market category of call conversation optimization solutions.

While AI was being used at the time to perform post-call analysis, what set Marc’s and Chris’ solution apart was that their technology was real-time, giving agents assistance live on calls — not after the call when it was too late. Chris and Marc coined the new innovation “real-time guidance,” and Balto was born.