Chris Kontes is the COO and Co-Founder of Balto, the #1 real-time guidance platform. After graduating from Franklin & Marshall College, Kontes joined Venture for America, a nonprofit that places entrepreneurial college graduates in growing startup ecosystems. Venture for America introduced Chris to TopOPPS, an enterprise SaaS company in Saint Louis. As he quickly made his way through the TopOPPS sales organization, Kontes and his now-cofounder noticed how easy it was to make the same mistakes on sales calls repeatedly. This insight led to the inception of Balto, a software solution that provides real-time guidance to customer service agents and sales representatives using artificial intelligence and conversation analytics. The company also recently launched real-time coaching and real-time QA - features that allow managers to score 100% of calls instantaneously as well as guide agents’ calls directly, all within the same platform.Since its founding in 2017, Balto has guided over 80M phone calls and provided over 160M real-time recommendations for agents.

Justin is a customer service expert, professional speaker, and business consultant that helps organizations maximize the strategic value of their customer experience initiatives. Over the course of his career, he’s coached and consulted with thousands of individuals around the globe on contact center and customer experience best practices. Today, Justin works with organizations to improve the impact of their performance management programs, drive more meaningful outcomes from their data, and align their customer service teams from the executive office to the front line. He is a frequent author of industry research, articles, and best practice content, a professional member of the National Speakers Association and featured expert for the New York Times, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, Fox News and numerous other media outlets.

Hope has been in the Insurance industry for 30 years with 25 of these years working in the call center environment. Hope has been employed with Sentry Insurance for 20 years. Hope recently transitioned into the role of Customer Delivery Manager for Sentry Insurance Consumer Products for Specialty Auto and Cycle. She is responsible for developing quality and training programs to align with enterprise customer experience expectations for both Specialty Auto and Cycle across Sentry’s US call centers and operational teams. Sentry’s customer base has a high Hispanic population therefore, Hope’s has developed quality and training programs supporting bilingual associates for Sentry. Additional responsibilities include collaboration with call center supervisors on trend awareness and creating action plans to address customer pain points. Hope has been a member of the QATC board since 2008 and enjoys networking with everyone that she has met through the call center community.