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, Bernstein 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 Bernstein navigate each call much easier. When Kontes learned of this macro, he knew Bernstein was onto something.

Through continued development and refinement, the small, homegrown macro solution that assisted Bernstein 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 Bernsteins’ and Kontes’ solution apart was that their technology was real-time, giving agents assistance live on calls — not after the call when it was too late. Kontes and Bernstein coined the new innovation “real-time guidance,” and Balto was born.

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 AI leads the market with over 200 million guided calls and has provided over 430 million real-time recommendations.