Automated Customer Experience Platform Ada Bolsters CCaaS Business in Channel
The company is on track to have over 80% of its business with the channel in 2023.
December 1, 2022
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CF: Can you describe more about what makes Ada unique from your competitors? What sets you apart?
Ada’s Nick Stocking: One thing that sets us apart is being able to be deployed across the entire customer journey. For instance, there are a lot of chatbots that only do marketing, right? They greet you when you visit the website, and they might be able to see that you click on some things. But it’s just a greeting. Then there’s a second chatbot that will schedule appointments for sales, trying to get you to the next step to talk to a sales rep. And then the last one is really support-focused on FAQs. We can do all three. We can notice what they do on the journey, what they click, what they put in the shopping cart, what they hover over, so they can say, “I noticed you’ve been eyeing those black shoes. We have a sale going on here, or here’s what we have in stock in a retail location near you. Do you want us to put this on hold?”
CF: What was Ada’s motivation to get into the channel? Who at Ada thought that this was a missing piece of the company’s business model?
NS: When I was interviewed for my position just over a year ago, Ada had just gotten into the channel, working with tech alliance partners. They didn’t realize over 70% of the major CCaaS platforms are sold via the channel. When I came on, I was tasked with making sure that we integrate with all the CCaaS providers, and then making sure that we get agreements with Telarus, for example.
CF: You work with many kinds of companies whose chatbots have to be designed to understand a specific dialogue unique to that particular business. How do you accomplish that with artificial intelligence?
NS: When we first talk to a customer, our company wants to understand the journey that they want their customers to go on. And we also want to make sure that we interview the best customer support reps or the sales reps or whoever they have interacting with their clients. What are your best agents saying today? We interview them and we figure out what is the optimal journey that the client should have.
We want to be able to mimic whatever the best agents are saying so that simultaneous interactions can happen at scale that are automated. We want the experiences with bots to be just like the best experiences that the best agents can create.
CF: I recently spoke to another company which said its AI is superior to some of its competitors because the company has been around the longest. They have a storehouse of recorded conversations to build their AI off of. But Ada is a newer company. How is your product competitive?
NS: We believe it to be superior to many out there because our technology is based on intent recognition. There’s a lot of AI that is built off of code that recognizes key phrases or matches words. Instead, ours is based on what’s the intent of what a customer is trying to ask.
CF: How do you measure intent? It seems like such a subjective thing.
NS: It’s what a customer is asking for, what they are trying to get resolved. So, when they ask for something, making sure that we’re matching to what the intent is, and then you build out a flow that actually answers that question. We put concepts in different buckets. For example, this might be the answer someone gets for a company’s refund policy, or return policy, or exchange policy. The technology puts it into all these different buckets. And over time, that’s what helps it grow from 30% in the first 30 days, and in having the fastest time to value to get up to 80%.
CF: Many people say that with AI it gets better when you use it longer. What makes yours better when you use a longer?
NS: It’s really in the way that we’re able to put the information together and present it to the brands to be able to make a business decision about how they want to answer specific questions when people have a certain intent. I’ll put it this way. It’s better because we’ll actually empower the brands to make the changes themselves where so many other AI might do a good job of recognizing a question, but if you need to change an answer, or if you need to update it, it’s incredibly difficult. It might require someone with an IT background going back to the company itself, the vendor itself and saying can you make this update.
Rather, Ada gives the keys back to them to drag and drop code, making it super easy to actually update and make changes. We give all the analytics back to the companies so they know exactly what is going on in the customer journey. We meet with the companies often to ensure they understand how to make those changes and to give best practices.
CF: Are you seeing that companies need fewer agents when they adopt your platform?
NS: Yes. However, we also see that the companies that use our platform grow and will end up buying more licenses. It’s not about cutting a call center in half. It’s about growing the company to become more profitable. There will always still be a use case for humans. And, if a company grows, it may be in a position financially to hire more.
That’s probably the best way to put it. We’ve partnered with a lot of tech alliance partners. Like Zendesk and Salesforce and several of the CCaaS providers like Five9 and Talkdesk. And sometimes they fear that we will automate so much that they won’t be able to sell as many licenses. But what we have found is they actually sell more licenses because the company grows, and they need to hire more agents to be able to handle the amount of volume.
CF: Ada increases efficiency for the contact center agent by 50%. How does it accomplish that?
NS: If and when the customer interaction escalates to a human, we not only give the whole context of the conversation to the agent, but our AI will summarize, giving the customer intent to the agent. It allows agents to really give that VIP experience because the agent will understand why a customer called in, or why they’re interacting. They’ll see the whole story without having to read the entire transcript.
CF: Are you saying that you’re not competing with the likes of NICE, Five9 or Genesys? It sounds like you have a slightly different product.
NS: All of the CCaaS providers have their own solution but have been open to partnering with us when they’ve seen our capabilities.
CF: What does the future look like for Ada in the next year?
NS: We are adding our conversational AI to be deployed within an IVR for brands that get a lot of calls. This will provide self-service options just by talking. Traditionally, the technology to do this has been difficult to build and deploy, but our interface will allow non-technical users to make changes so that brands can control their messaging like never before.
CF: What does the future look like for Ada in the next year?
NS: We are adding our conversational AI to be deployed within an IVR for brands that get a lot of calls. This will provide self-service options just by talking. Traditionally, the technology to do this has been difficult to build and deploy, but our interface will allow non-technical users to make changes so that brands can control their messaging like never before.
You might not have heard of Ada, but it’s possible you’ve used the automated customer experience platform. Ada’s conversational AI technology is utilized by hundreds of companies, including some of the biggest: Facebook, Samsung, Zoom, Square and Verizon, to name a few.
Ada’s capabilities allow companies to personalize brand interactions, helping them prioritize the customer experience (CX).
In October, Ada entered into a supplier agreement with Telarus, the largest privately-held technology solutions brokerage. Thousands of Telarus partners sell CCaaS and focus on next-gen technologies, making it an obvious partnership, said Ada.
Ada’s Nick Stocking
“It was an easy decision to work together,” said Nick Stocking, senior channel manager, strategic alliances at Ada. “[Telarus’] regionalized support model gives us access to consultants who have accounts across the globe.”
We recently compiled a list of 20 top CCaaS providers offering products and services via channel partners. |
The Telarus agreement is not Ada’s only foray into the channel, as it worked with some strategic TSBs/TSDs. However, this new partnership is a signal that the company is making its mark with channel organizations.
Ada Channel History
More than a year ago, Ada tasked Nick Stocking with establishing the company’s referral channel program with CCaaS consultants. The company is on track to have over 80% of its business with the channel in 2023. As companies tighten their spend on customer support, they are showing great interest in automation strategies that scale. Organizations are leaning on consultants to find the right solution that proves an ROI the quickest.
In this interview with Channel Futures, Stocking discusses the technology behind the brand, Ada’s competitors, as well as what were the motivations for entering the channel. In addition, he maps out the company’s goals for the year ahead.
Channel Futures: Let’s get started with a very basic question. What is Ada?
Nick Stocking: Simply put, Ada is an automated brand interaction platform that’s composed of digital, virtual agents and voice bots that are powered through conversational artificial intelligence. Our claim to fame is being able to resolve 30% of the support inquiries within 30 days and 80% once fully implemented.
Also, we try to stay away from the word chatbot because there are so many bad ones out there. They aren’t good at resolving as many inquiries. They’re very simple, answering just a handful of basic FAQs. You’re on your own from there. Really, you have to go and figure it out yourself. Most contact centers are built in such a way that they try to talk to their customers as little as possible.
For the rest of the interview, see the slideshow above.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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