Crystal Knows (A Complete Review)

This is a thorough guide that introduces readers to Crystal Knows, a tool that integrates personality psychology and AI. Our blog will talk about what services are offered by Crystal and how they can help you. Reading this will give you a complete picture of what Crystal can do to improve how your organisation functions.

How Will Crystal Help My Organisation?

Crystal utilises powerful and research-based personality theories to optimise a company’s sales, hiring, and training processes. It can help your organisation by:

• Deepening your understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and that of your team members
• Show you how to enrich all relationships between colleagues
• Improve hiring procedures to save time and find the right recruits
• Effective and efficient sales procedures
• Make meetings more facetious and better flowing
• Provide strategies for effective conflict resolution
• Help each individual improve their formal and informal communication
• Help create synergy between you and your organisation

How Crystal Makes Your Job Easier

In this section, we will expand on all these services that Crystal provides to make any professional or organisation function a lot better. We will list information about everything you need to know regarding how to use it, pricing, and what results to expect. So, without further ado, let’s begin!

What is Crystal?

Crystal is an online platform that integrates personality insights into all organisational processes. These include sales, hiring, training, team building, and communication. This is a tool that embeds into your browser to use a Personality AI as you browse online professional profiles.

The idea is that you can look at any individual’s social media profile on websites like LinkedIn or Facebook and learn about their personality. Crystal will give you pointers on how the person behaves so that you make informed decisions when interacting. It also tells you what to do or not do to make your interaction more fruitful.

About the Company

Crystal is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, USA and was founded in 2015. The organisation aims to help people understand themselves better and to communicate more effectively.

In early 2015, it developed and released the first Personality AI app that can describe people’s personality without an assessment. It does this by analysing millions of online data points. Through this information, the AI accurately identifies a person’s motivations, communication style, and other behaviour traits.

The people behind Crystal are Drew D’Agostino (founder) and Greg Skloot (CEO). Both individuals were recognised by Forbes as 30 Under 30 in enterprise technology.

How Does Crystal Know?

Despite the name, this isn’t some crystal ball that will make predictions based on intuition or spiritual energies. Crystal uses research-backed theories from personality psychology and integrates these models with artificial intelligence. 

Combining these forces, Crystal gives users fairly accurate and reliable strategies to optimise operations. We use the word fairly because personalities do have individual differences. Having said that, Crystal definitely knows enough to gain the trust of several MNCs.

Let’s explore Crystal’s resources some more:

The Psychology of Personalities

The term personality refers to an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms – hidden or not – behind those patterns. 

Personality psychology is the branch of psychology that studies personality and its variation among individuals. This field of study has evolved significantly over the years. The personality models used by Crystal are Big 5, DISC, Enneagram, and 16-Personalities.

Introducing DISC

DISC is a behaviour self-assessment tool built from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 DISC emotional and behavioural theory. This model is centred on four personality traits that can be used to understand a person’s behaviour patterns. 

These four traits are Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance. All four are placed against the two axes of attention (passive or active) and environment. The responses can be described as:

• Dominance: activity in an antagonistic environment
• Inducement: activity in a favourable environment
• Submissive: passivity in a favourable environment
• Compliance: passivity in an antagonistic environment

This theory was then developed into a behavioural assessment tool by industrial psychologist Walter Vernon Clarke. Since then, it has been used by countless organisations to improve their productivity. 

Crystal is a tool that allows you to access the data interpreted by DISC and artificial intelligence. In Crystal’s analysis, these four traits are labelled as Dominant (D), Influential (I), Steady (S), and Conscientious (C). As quoted by Marston, it helps you “realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.”

What is Personality AI?

This is a groundbreaking new branch of artificial intelligence that combines traditional machine learning, data analytics, and behaviour psychology. It helps professionals to break barriers within communication, establish trust, strengthen empathy, build meaningful relationships, and win customers.

Research conducted on the effectiveness of Personality AI found that it can be used to enhance advertising effectiveness. But that is just one of the many benefits.

To put in the words of Greg Skloot, CEO of Crystal Knows, Personality AI is a technology that analyses millions of data points. Through this analysis, it identifies a person’s personality before you even meet them.

Who Should Use Crystal?

Crystal can be used by individuals, teams, and organisations. It is primarily used by large scale companies but is incredibly useful for any set up involved in group dynamics. This could be education institutes, non-profits, vocational academies, or even government organisations.

In fact, anyone who wishes to learn customised communication tips on how to work with any given person can benefit from Crystal. It will help you understand yourself better and know exactly how to interact with someone you need to engage with.

Problems Addressed by Crystal

Here, we are going to discuss the specifics of how Crystal gives you the above mentioned benefits.

Leaders Can Lead Better

Before organisations start using Crystal, they face quite a few problems that may seem unavoidable. Leaders often find themselves largely “on their own”, preparing for difficult conversations, and using trial and error.

Crystal’s DISC Fluency makes this learning curve much smoother as leaders get tools and resources to navigate conflict. Crystal can assist in hiring decisions, critical feedback, performance reviews, and more.

Sales Reps Can Represent Better

In companies that generate revenue through sales, it can be hard to ensure that each sales representative is consistent in their message. Generally, these employees are either unable to or take years to learn how to adapt their pitch to their audience.

With Crystal, this issue is eliminated as the representatives are shown how to consistently present their message. This is done in a way that resonates with their audience’s unique needs and preferences.

HR Can Hire Better

Typically, hiring decisions are made based on personal likeness, gut feelings, and sometimes misaligned expectations. These pointers feel important but more often than not misfire. Hiring need not be a risk-taking experiment.

Using Crystal gives you access to hard core data so that decisions are only made when stakeholders have aligned expectations. As a result, you don’t waste your time or that of the recruit.

Existing Users of Crystal

In 2020, Crystal Knows generated a revenue of $2.3 million. Over the last couple of years, the world has been excited with the idea of organisational psychology tools that use DISC. Crystal, being one of the top ones, has clients all across the globe.

90% of Fortune 500 companies use Crystal. These include big shots like Disney, Coca Cola, Air BnB, Google, Nike, 3M, Dropbox, Amazon, Hyatt, Accenture, and many more.

What can I do with Crystal?

By now, you’re probably quite intrigued by the concept of Crystal Knows. Nevertheless, you might still be wondering about the details. How exactly will you be using this tool? This section will explain everything.

Crystal for Efficient Hiring

If you want to optimise your company’s hiring process, you can either send the Crystal assessment test to the candidate of interest. Or you can predict their personality type using the Crystal Chrome extension. It will help you assess the degree to which the candidate will fit the job.

To start hiring through Crystal, go to Jobs through the dashboard and create a new role. You can add details of the job title and description. Based on this information, Crystal will create the ideal personality type for it. Then, your hiring team can fill a job expectations survey to identify the key traits needed for this role.

Once this process is complete, invite candidates by adding names of individuals you have already analysed using the Chrome extension, by pasting resumes, or by sending the Crystal assessment test.

Crystal will analyse all candidates and display which individual matches the ideal personality type the most. That way, you hire only the best suited candidate.

Crystal for Better Teams

With Crystal for Teams, working in groups has never been easier. Users get access to many robust personality assessment models and tools including DISC, Enneagram, 16-Personalities, Big Five, and more. Each test takes less than 10 minutes to complete.

After you log in to your Crystal dashboard for the first time, you can take these tests to complete your assessment. They give you highly detailed insights on your behaviour patterns and working style. You’ll learn about what energises you, stresses you, your preferred communication style, to name a few.

You can also access the same information about everyone in your team. This data helps you build powerful playbooks that can be customised based on your needs. Playbooks give you all the dos and don’t for working with others for negotiation, conflict resolution, business partnership, etc. 

Crystal offers effective suggestions on how to work one-on-one or in groups through comparisons of working style. Use this to navigate any communication scenario, whether its meetings, brainstorming, conflict, or decisions.

Crystal for Improved Sales

Significantly increase the success rate of your sales team through Crystal’s helpful insights. With Crystal for Sales, you can predict anyone’s DISC type across LinkedIn. This data helps you throughout the process from prospecting to negotiation. 

Once you have the Chrome extension, click it with the prospective buyer’s profile open. It will tell you everything you need to know about their personality through their DISC type, core characteristics, and placement on the DISC chart.

You’ll find out about their behaviour, energisers, stressors, and can get quick tips to make a sales pitch. You can also compare with other personalities. Crystal helps you schedule meetings through email templates directly in the Chrome extension. Alternatively, you can visit the Crystal dashboard > Sales > Customers to view all the profiles you just analysed on LinkedIn.

Here, you can create meetings by adding multiple people and then get information of their personality type and negotiation style. Crystal gives tips on how to discuss pricing and what to do if they say no. A relationship matrix collates all their individual variables to let you tailor a sales approach accordingly.

Crystal for Productive Meetings

The coolest thing about Crystal is that you can use it to create playbooks for all kinds of meetings. That means you won’t be wasting anyone’s time, you’ll be able to communicate a lot better, and decisions can be made smoothly.

A Playbook gives you personality insights and advice for a specific group of people in a specific situation. For every professional interaction you have to conduct, whether it’s one-on-one or in a group, Crystal will tell you how everyone will think, behave, and make decisions.

You get to select the profiles you want to approach, choose your meeting objective, and then get all these details in a downloadable, shareable, and printable format. You can also look at relationship reports. These explain how two people can improve their relationship through specific suggestions on communication, dealing with change, working together, managing stress, resolving conflict, and building trust.

Needless to say, Crystal gets rid of as much uncertainty from professional interactions as possible. Consequently, meetings are a lot more productive and efficient.

Crystal’s Conversation Coach

Some people have natural charisma and communication skills that help them glide through professional interactions. But for others, it either takes a lot of work experience or specialised training for them to learn these skills.

Crystal’s Conversation Coach helps make this process a lot easier. This is a tool that can be accessed from profiles on Crystal or the Chrome extension. In two simple steps, the Conversation Coach will give you a bunch of details to ease conversations.

The first step is to pick a communication mode. You can choose to call, email, or have a meeting with the person who’s profile you’re viewing. Then, pick an objective for your conversation. Crystal offers several options like make sales pitch, ask for raise, give instructions, collaborate for projects, brainstorm ideas, convince them to hire you, deliver bad news, resolve a conflict, give feedback, and many more.

Once you fill these particulars, the Conversation Coach will give you pointers on what to say, do, and not do. Using these quick tips leads to higher open rates and response rates to your emails, smoother phone calls that produce results, and better flowing meetings.

Crystal Chrome Extension to Save Time

We’ve mentioned the Chrome extension several times now but you might be wondering what this is. This extension gives you access to many of Crystal’s features through the Google Chrome web browser. As of now, this extension isn’t available for other browsers.

This saves a lot of time as you can multitask or work a lot faster with the quick access it provides. You need not wait for people to fill the Crystal assessment forms or send you their resumes to find out about them. The extension uses DISC and AI to predict everything you need to know. All of this with the convenience of not having to open Crystal’s website.

How Does One Start Using Crystal?

How to Sign Up

Signing up for Crystal is a quick and easy process. You just have to write your full name, enter a company email, and set a password. Then you can access the Crystal dashboard and it will ask you to describe your gender, job role, and official title.

Once you have filled in these basic details, you can start building your personality profile by taking the assessments. At this point, a prompt will direct you towards the Chrome Store where you can download the Chrome extension.

Crystal’s Mobile App

Crystal Knows is also available for mobile phones and can be downloaded through Google Play or the App Store. You can access all of your saved personality profiles for customers, prospects and more.

This gives you the benefits of Crystal on the go. You can use the DISC information or the Conversation Coach even as you grab a coffee before your meetings.

Using Crystal’s Free trials

You can try each of Crystal’s products for free before you decide to upgrade to premium. These give you ten free views on the Chrome Extension for Sales, your DISC personality assessment for Teams, and one free job with sample candidates for Hiring.

How Much Does Premium Cost?

If you wish to upgrade to premium, click here. In Sales, you get the LinkedIn extension and unlimited playbooks for $29 per month. In Crystal for Teams, get your own full DISC profile, that of your team members, and playbooks for them at a rate that depends on your team size.

Upgrading to premium in Crystal for Hiring gives you access to pre-hire assessments, candidate job fit measures, and interview insights. The pricing for this too depends on how many people you hire in a year.

What Crystal Offers for Free

What’s amazing about Crystal Knows is that there are quite a few benefits you can access without paying a single penny. No, we’re not talking about the free trial for products. It’s not one of those schemes where you get a sampler for a given period of time after which you get charged. 

There are multiple services that you can avail on the Crystal website without ever having to sign up or giving your contact details. Let’s go over what these are:

Personality Tests

There are plenty of free personality tests that you can take on the Crystal website. Whether it’s the Enneagram test, 16-Personalities, DISC, or Crystal’s other assessments, anyone can try them out.

Each test takes less than ten minutes and the questions use scales for responses. You get a comprehensive and robust report that describes your behaviour styles. These reports are packed with useful information that can help you understand yourselves a lot better. Viewers can also learn about any personality type of their interest.

Quality Content

Crystal’s blog is a rich source of high-quality content relevant to all professional setups. These quick articles typically take 5-minutes to read and cover an impressive range of topics. You can browse through their four categories of Hiring, Coaching & Leadership, Professional Development, and Sales.

The content includes personality descriptions of celebrities, suggestions and explanations of workplace dynamics, and updates on Crystal or personality AI. If you’re a personality junkie, you can spend a lot of time reading these for free.

Online Resources (EBooks and case studies)

Another incredibly useful free service by Crystal is their collection of online resources. Primarily, these contain short e-books that talk about how to use personality psychology for important organisational tasks. 

You’ll find texts related to sales, career decisions, improving communication, better interviews, building trust, and personality AI. The resources also comprise featured case studies. These are presentations of existing clients of Crystal and explain how their organisation benefited from Crystal Knows.

Reading the case studies will not only give you a general idea of Crystal’s competency, but will help you in two more ways. First, you’ll learn about the areas for improvement in other companies that could be common for you as well. Second, you’ll understand what strategies Crystal took to solve them. This can give you a blueprint of what to do if you choose to work on it independently.

Alternatives to Crystal

We’ve taken a good look at what Crystal is and how it can help your organisation. However, before deciding to purchase it, one must consider the product’s competition. Here we will look at two key competitors for Crystal Knows and compare all three services.

Feature	Crystal	Humantic	Predictive Index
Personality Assessment	x	x	x
DISC	x	x
Chrome Extension	x	x
Mobile App	x
Online Resources	x	x	x
Low Pricing		x
Communication Coaching	x
Playbooks	x
Hiring Help	x	x	x
Sales Support	x	x	x
Team Dynamics	x

Humantic AI

Humantic is another tool that uses personality AI to do the same things. The makers of Humantic openly market themselves as competition for Crystal. The comparison page on their official website writes, “what Crystal started, we have perfected”. But is this really so?

In our analysis we found that Humantic does offer a few things that Crystal doesn’t. These are mostly things like specific advice for recruiters/salespersons, DISC scores, and Big Five scores. Meanwhile, Crystal offers both Enneagram and 16-Personalities assessments that Humantic doesn’t.

Humantic can predict from twitter and email accounts as well, which is an upgrade from Crystal. On the other hand, Crystal is ahead because of their team analysis feature for recruiters, which Humantic is still workin on.

Overall, Humantic presents itself to have better prediction accuracy and Chrome Store ratings. But the rating is based on only 18 reviewers whereas Crystal has an average of 4 stars from 160+ individuals. It seems to us that Humantic is leveraging Crystal’s popularity to monopolise the market. It even starts pricing at $20 less than Crystal. 

However, Crystal has existed for longer, has a wider user base, and shows more integrity in how they run their business. If customers are looking for fast and cheaper solutions, Humantic AI is a good fit. Those who are looking for someone they can trust, Crystal is a better option.

The Predictive Index

The Predictive Index Workforce Assessment is a tool that helps a company to understand how to drive their employees. It uses PI Behavioral and Cognitive Assessments, workshops, and consultations to generate insights.

Organisations can use this for better hiring, management, talent strategy, and employee engagement. Essentially, it serves most of the purposes that Crystal does, except that it uses a different model for personality assessment.

A plus point is that Predictive Index offers training classes and webinars unlike Crystal. However, the downside is that the results can be a little difficult to interpret without attending these classes. Some users write that the time it takes to really learn how to read the report is extensive.

A few other complaints are that pricing can be expensive for small businesses and the official website is not structured well. Other than that, the Predictive Index is a decent alternative to Crystal Knows.

Conclusion

This was a thorough guide that introduces readers to Crystal Knows, a tool that integrates personality psychology and AI. Our blog talked about what services are offered by Crystal and how they can help you. Reading this gave you a complete picture of what Crystal can do to improve how your organisation functions.

Crystal is a tool that uses the DISC theory of personality to predict and analyse people’s behaviour. This can be incredibly useful in any professional setup because if you know how a particular person behaves, you can alter your approach to suit them.

The makers of Crystal have designed its products so that one can reap these benefits for better sales, hiring, meetings, and communication. Since Crystal features a Chrome extension, it makes all these processes a lot simpler and faster.

Here, we explained everything you need to know about how to use Crystal to optimise your company’s operations. We also discussed signing up, pricing, free services, and Crystal’s competition.

FAQs (Crystal Knows Complete Review)

Citations

• https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EJM-12-2019-0941/full/html