Ada Support, a Toronto-based company developing AI-driven customer experiences, today revealed that it nabbed a $44 million series B tranche. Cofounder and CEO Mike Murchison says it will be used to scale Ada’s platform and provide enhanced functionality across traditional business silos, which could help organizations optimize customer service operations while improving overall customer satisfaction.
Accel led this latest funding round in Ada, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Firstmark, Version One, and Leaders Fund. It brings the company’s total raised to over $56 million following a $14 million series A round in December 2018.
Ada’s no-code AI chatbot acts on each customer’s information, intent, and interests with tailored answers, proactive discounts, and relevant recommendations in over 100 languages. It breaks up conversations over multiple blocks of text and incorporates emojis, pictures, and other forms of multimedia, playing videos within the chatbot window to provide visual instructions and answers to customer inquiries.
Chatbots’ greetings and responses can be randomized to ensure that every automated conversation feels unique. Plus, Ada offers an editor that lets businesses automate dynamic answers before they’re asked. Using a drag-and-drop interface, they can create chatbot conversations with multimedia content and replicate conversations while building A/B tests that compare controlled changes in content.
Using Ada’s platform, organizations can train a chatbot to resolve industry-specific inquiries. Moreover, they can prioritize and allocate resources to deliver the appropriate level of support by automatically identifying and escalating the highest-value inquiries. And thanks to Ada’s support for API authentication, they can enable customers to access and change account information, update their plans, and add new products without having to speak to an agent.
On the backend, Ada’s analytics dashboard collates insights and data from every automated customer conversation. In addition to uncovering unanswered questions and missing information, it spotlights metrics like the percentage of engaged customers and topics and the share of conversations that require an agent; spikes in inquiry volume over a certain period; and the number of live agents required during peak seasons.
Ada is in a profitable market, no doubt. According to Markets and Markets, the size of the chatbot market is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion in 2024. Mindsay, which provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite of conversational chatbots tailored to meet the requirements of large hospitality and service, transportation, recently raised $10 million. Not to be outdone, in May 2018, enterprise chatbot platform Avaamo raised a $14.2 million round led by Intel Capital.
Ada’s customers — which include Shopify, Mailchimp, Telus, Zoom, Coinbase, Upwork, Telus, Air Asia, Scotts, and IAC — chiefly occupy the banking, insurance, retail and ecommerce, telecom, travel, and utilities sectors. The company claims it reduced Air Asia customers’ wait times by 98% in four weeks and that it saved Telus 150,000 hours of customer effort. Beyond Telus, Ada’s chatbots handle and estimated over 20 million customer conversations annually.
Author: Kyle Wiggers.
Source: Venturebeat
