Why Explainable AI is the Secret to Turning Subjective Performance Into a Measurable System for CX Leaders

Generative AI is rapidly transforming customer experience, but the way most companies coach their service agents is still stuck in the past. Coaching remains episodic, subjective, and disconnected from business outcomes. Too often, the approach involves supervisors listening to one or two calls, forming in-the-moment plans, and then forgetting about them, making it difficult to tell what actually drives agent improvement. The next phase of CX improvement depends on turning AI into shared performance infrastructure, not another layer of automation.

Eleanore An is a Senior Project Manager at Cresta. With an MBA, an engineering degree, and background as a consultant at Bain & Company, she brings a unique mix of strategic, operational, and product expertise to the problem. An says in order to realize tangible CX gains, companies must reframe AI as the core performance infrastructure, connecting behavior to outcomes in a continuous feedback loop.

"AI needs to be explainable, predictable, and something people can validate. If agents don’t understand why the system is telling them something, they’re not going to trust it," says An. She believes AI’s value comes from tying guidance directly to observable behaviors, surfacing what matters, and reinforcing it at the moment it counts. Cresta puts that philosophy into practice with a single system that unifies real-time agent guidance, behavior tracking, and coaching into one cohesive engine.

• Outcome-driven feedback: By leveraging insights from thousands of interactions, the platform identifies which behaviors meaningfully improve agent performance so supervisors can focus on what matters. "Sometimes, we've seen that some of the things managers care about do not really move the needle on outcomes like CSAT or sales conversions. So rather than just relying on gut instinct, let's look at what agent behaviors actually drive outcomes and focus on those," An says.

• Knowledge, delivered instantly: That data then informs real-time hints that guide agents during live calls, for example, when a customer signals a concern over price. "We'll send active hints like a talk track for objection handling. We're essentially bringing the learning closer to the agents versus relying on them to retrieve the knowledge."

For An, the success of any AI tool in a high-pressure CX environment hinges on trust, especially as AI is becoming deeply integrated into business software. Achieving that trust, she explains, begins with designing transparent systems and is solidified when agents are given tangible examples alongside feedback.

• Transparent by design: To counter the "black box" models that erode user trust, An explains, the mechanism for proof is built directly into the product. "We try to always link to evidence. For every AI evaluation, the system shows where an event happened in the transcript and provides an explanation."

• A single truth: A system that's unified helps organizations avoid having to reconcile numbers between multiple platforms, which can lead to confusion and a lack of confidence in the data. "So you won't have a scenario where quality management says one thing, coaching says another, and real-time assist says a third," An explains. "It's all connected."

This approach, which includes assessing agents' ROI, makes it easy to get a clear view of business impact. Customer A/B testing shows gains in both operational efficiency and top-line effectiveness, leading to a clear lift in sales conversions. An says the efficiency improvements extend beyond the agent level. "We have seen supervisors expand their capacity from managing 10 or 11 agents to as many as 15 to 18. They can do this because our platform automatically provides the performance data they need. They no longer have to manually fish for calls and insights."

Perhaps the most powerful metric for success is agent adoption, which An says is overwhelmingly positive. "When agents get coaching in the right area, their ramp-up time is much faster and they start to see their compensation increase. They love it. We've even heard that some companies now use Cresta as a recruiting tool, reassuring prospective agents they will have all the tools they need to succeed."