St. Louis, MO — Balto is pleased to announce CEO and Founder Marc Bernstein was honored at the 2022 CCW Excellence Awards held at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, by winning the Next Generation Leaders award. The award recognizes the best of the best among the next generation of contact center leaders relentlessly committed to improving the end-to-end customer experience.
“I’ll be honest: this means a lot,” said Bernstein. “Only six years ago, I was a complete outsider to the contact center space. I’ve been immensely fortunate to learn from so many contact center greats, and I’ve always done my best to lead Balto to be a force of progress and positivity in the industry. It feels incredible seeing my impact, and of course Balto’s impact, recognized like this.”
The CCW Excellence Awards recognize the most innovative companies and top-performing executives for their extraordinary contributions to the customer contact profession. Their mission is to raise the bar for the contact center profession by identifying top practices, superior thinking, creativity, and execution across the full spectrum of contact center functions. Fellow winners included contact center leaders, superstar agents, tech geniuses, creative service providers, inventors, and disruptors.
The award ceremony was part of Customer Contact Week’s annual conference in late June, which brings together top executives, business leaders, insiders, and vendors in the customer contact and CX industry.
About Bernstein
Bernstein graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with degrees in Marketing, Psychology, and Entrepreneurship in 2015. In 2017, he co-founded Balto with colleague Chris Kontes and longtime friend Davidson Girard. Under Bernstein’s leadership, the company has seen exponential growth as a result of its unwavering mission to transform how contact centers communicate with their customers and empower their agents with the help of AI.
About Balto
Balto guides agents to say the right thing on every call. Top-performing contact centers trust Balto’s AI-powered Real-Time Guidance, Real-Time Coaching, and Real-Time QA to increase sales conversions, prevent costly compliance mistakes, and improve customer experience. Founded in 2017 and based in St. Louis, Missouri, Balto has transformed contact center operations and guided over 130 million conversations worldwide. Balto.ai
Maria Edington
Maria Edington is the Vice President of Marketing at Balto, where she works closely with contact center leaders to improve how teams function day-to-day and plan for what’s ahead. Over the past five years, she’s led initiatives focused on performance, quality, compliance, and the practical use of AI across the contact center floor. Her experience spans complex, high-volume industries including Medicare, P&C insurance, financial services, collections, home improvement, and banking—sectors where conversations are tightly regulated, high-stakes, and often the last mile of the customer experience. Maria has contributed to research on Medicare Advantage trends, MedPAC policy, and eBroker financial performance, and regularly works with operators navigating shifting compliance requirements and productivity demands. With a background in engineering, Maria brings a systems-level mindset to how contact centers work—and how they can work better. Her focus: helping contact centers modernize—adopting smarter tools, better habits, and a stronger foundation for what’s ahead.
