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Michelle Donnelly
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| 6 min read

AI is Merging Customer Support and Sales Into One Powerful Experience with Michelle Donnelly

By Brent W. Peterson

Brent Peterson sits down with Michelle Donnelly, Chief Revenue Officer at Crescendo, to explore how AI-native customer experience solutions are transforming the way brands interact with their customers. The conversation covers everything from autonomous digital agents to the critical role humans still play in customer support. Michelle brings a wealth of experience from her time at Salesforce and the AI chip industry, and she shares fascinating real-world examples of how Crescendo’s approach is turning traditional cost centers into profit centers. If you care about customer experience, this episode deserves your full attention.

Key Takeaways

  • AI agents must work seamlessly with human agents. A digital-only approach without a human fallback creates frustrating loops that drive customers away.
  • Customer support is becoming a revenue channel. By combining personalization, memory, and business context, AI agents can turn a simple support interaction into an upsell opportunity.
  • Speed to value matters. Crescendo deploys in under four weeks, a dramatic improvement over traditional SaaS implementations that can take months.
  • Outcome-based pricing changes the game. Rather than selling seats, Crescendo charges based on outcomes, aligning their success with the customer’s success.
  • Multimodal interactions let customers choose. Whether through chat, voice, WhatsApp, or email, the customer decides how they want to engage, and the AI adapts accordingly.
  • Quality assurance reveals powerful patterns. Analyzing interactions across the customer base surfaces product issues and opportunities that brands would otherwise miss.
  • Knowledge bases improve over time. The AI learns from every interaction and actually enhances the brand’s existing knowledge base rather than relying on static content.

About Michelle Donnelly

Michelle Donnelly serves as Chief Revenue Officer at Crescendo, an AI startup focused on reimagining customer experience through the seamless integration of digital and human agents. Before joining Crescendo, Michelle spent a decade at Salesforce, where she worked across sales, service, marketing, and commerce clouds. She also held a role at an AI chip company focused on inference technology. Michelle brings a bold, fearless approach to her professional life. Her experience spans enterprise SaaS, AI infrastructure, and now AI-native customer experience solutions.

Episode Summary

Crescendo was born in a General Catalyst boardroom where founders noticed a gap in the AI customer support pitches they were hearing. The missing piece was the human in the loop. That insight became the foundation for Crescendo’s approach, combining truly autonomous digital agents with AI-empowered human agents.

Brent shares his own frustrating experience with a chatbot that trapped him in a loop, repeating the same unhelpful answer four times until he canceled the service entirely. Michelle responds by explaining that this happens when companies deploy AI agents that lack proper integration, memory, and the ability to escalate to a human. She emphasizes that Crescendo’s solution connects digital agents to human agents so that when a customer needs a real person, all the context from the AI interaction transfers immediately.

Michelle then walks through a compelling example involving Veer, a family adventure gear company. She describes a scenario where a customer calls about a $79 canopy replacement. The AI identifies the correct product, prevents a return, and then recommends additional accessories based on the customer’s family situation and stated plans. The result is a 3X increase in order value, transforming a simple support call into a meaningful sales interaction. “We have merged support and sales,” Michelle states during the conversation.

The discussion moves into multimodal capabilities. Michelle explains how customers can shift between text and voice mid-interaction. She uses the example of a smart sprinkler company where a customer might start texting but then switch to voice so they can simultaneously adjust app settings while receiving instructions. This flexibility ensures the customer gets help in the format that works best for them at any given moment.

Quality assurance and pattern recognition come up next. Michelle shares a story about a shoe company where customer data revealed widespread frustration with inconsistent sizing across product lines. The patterns Crescendo surfaced allowed the brand to address the sizing issue directly, improving the experience for the entire customer base.

On deployment and pricing, Michelle contrasts Crescendo’s model with the traditional SaaS approach. She describes sales cycles ranging from 14 to 90 days and deployments that take less than four weeks. The pricing model focuses on outcomes rather than seats, with flat monthly costs that absorb holiday spikes and unexpected surges. This approach removes risk from the customer and aligns incentives between Crescendo and the brands they serve.

Michelle discusses how Crescendo started in the mid-market but is moving quickly up-market, winning business from competitors that take months to deploy. She draws a parallel to Salesforce’s own journey from SMB-focused startup to enterprise giant.

The conversation wraps with Brent noting there was easily another hour of discussion to be had, a testament to the depth of the topic and Michelle’s expertise.

Final Thoughts

This episode of Talk Commerce makes one thing clear. Customer experience is no longer just about answering questions and closing tickets. It has become a strategic function that drives revenue, improves products, and builds lasting relationships. Michelle Donnelly and the team at Crescendo are demonstrating that when you get the balance right between AI and human agents, everybody wins. The customer gets faster, more relevant support. The brand gets actionable insights and new revenue. And the contact center transforms from a cost line into a growth engine.

So here is the question worth considering. Is your current customer experience building toward a crescendo, or is it falling flat?

Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelledonnelly/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/crescendocx/

This has been produced in cooperation with Content Cucumber
https://www.contentcucumber.com/

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AI agents AI customer experience contact center Crescendo customer retention customer service automation customer support digital agents ecommerce Michelle Donnelly multimodal support outcome-based pricing saas Talk Commerce Upselling

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Brent W. Peterson

Brent W. Peterson

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