Our story

Built By and For Contact Center Agents and Managers

Balto knows what makes for successful contact center conversations because Balto’s founders learned it firsthand.

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.

“Not Just Any
Tech Company”

We know our customers. Over half of Balto employees (aka Baltonians) have prior experience working in the contact center, sales, customer service, and collections spaces.

In 2021, Balto expanded its product line to include Real-Time Coaching and Real-Time QA, giving contact centers even more tools to unleash agent performance. And in 2022, Balto became the first to introduce real-time guidance in Spanish, improving the customer experience in a rapidly growing, underserved market. In 2023, they stepped into after-call work with Real-Time Notetaker.

Today, Balto’s real-time Al leads the market with over 300 million guided calls and has provided over 430 million real-time recommendations.