Danny Wymer is Senior Director of Strategic Accounts for Cresta, a Palo Alto, California-based provider of call center software that helps organizations redefine the way they approach customer interactions by combining human expertise with Artificial Intelligence capabilities. While AI has been all over both consumer and business news in the past year, few people understand its potential impact on their business.

“Cresta delivers an improvement to efficiency or effectiveness at every level of the contact center, leveraging human-centric AI,” Wymer says. “Using our platform, you can identify and surface key behaviors that drive optimal outcomes, whether that be increased revenue, cost reduction or even improvements to customer satisfaction. The platform will pick up and sort of synthesize these things, which enables call center leadership teams to tweak agent talk tracks or how they’re guided throughout the call, to optimize for particular results or for outcomes that they’re seeking.”

What that doesn’t mean, he says, is eliminating the human agents from call centers. “We are currently building a next generation virtual agent or virtual assistant. It’s main role is to help organizations understand what conversations to automate and drive to self-service, and which ones to actually pass to a live agent. It may be that it’s a more complex issue or the caller needs more TLC, or that there is an opportunity there to upsell a customer. The idea is not to degrade the customer experience while trying to reduce costs. It’s a very nuanced analysis and with training, AI can help call centers achieve the correct balance.”

Wymer’s deep understanding of call center technology and operations in the vacation ownership industry is essential to his work at Cresta. He’s worked with timeshare companies for the last 15 years and has experience at both Gartner and Medallia. “Working in Orlando, which is really the Mecca for vacation ownership, a lot of our clients were in that space,” he says. “When I joined Cresta, it was just a natural fit for me to work with vacation ownership companies as I already had strong relationships with people in the industry. This industry is built on relationships, so it has been beneficial both for me and for the executives I work with that I already know and understand their business needs. I think they see me as someone who is strategic, reliable and dependable, and that’s a reason to sit down and see how we can work together.”

Once he begins working with a client, Cresta can immediately increase management’s visibility into what is happening in their call centers. “A supervisor or manager in a call center can only listen to a certain percentage of an agent’s calls, maybe just 2 or 3 percent, each month. If an average call handle time is eight minutes, even doing that is going to take a long time. With our software, they can understand at scale what is happening across their operations. They know who is doing it right and who needs help, and most importantly, what they need help with.”

He continues, “In most call centers, you have 10 percent of agents that are the star performers, and you have 10 percent who are on the bottom. Then there’s this massive group in the middle, and you can really help them take steps that will have them acting like a star performer. We can identify key behaviors of top performers, then supervisors can coach those employees on how to adopt those behaviors to become a top performer. If a call goes badly, supervisors can be notified immediately so they can take action to resolve the issue.”

How call center agents react to the new tools is all about how leadership portrays the investment, Wymer says. “It should be communicated as we are implementing a technology that is really an investment in having a better understanding of how management can help you in the areas where you need help and to applaud you in the areas where you are doing well. Ultimately, the technology can give agents the tools they need to better navigate systems, products and processes and be more successful.”

Wymer sees this technology as essential for vacation ownership companies because their calls are much more complex than simply booking a hotel reservation. “It’s really a win for the agents because they can be more successful in their jobs more quickly, which means they are going to be able to make the salary they were promised and more,” he says. “A high performing agent at an exchange company usually really knows the resorts and what they offer. With our technology, we can push information to them as they need it.”

When it comes to his own vacations, Wymer is split between the beach and ski vacations. He’s also split between family vacations and getting away on a couple’s vacation. “We have five kids, so a couple’s vacation is something we would definitely look forward to,” he says. “Right now the kids are young and have a lot of activities, such as soccer, so that’s what we are really focused on.”