Ada and Zendesk Unite to Improve Chatbot Experience for Customer Service

Ada along with Zendesk announced a deep integration that will greatly improve customer and agent experiences by enabling a symbiotic relationship between AI and human agents.

Ada brings value as a chatbot provider with:

• Simple user experience - Ada's intuitive authoring environment makes it easy to create content without the need for a deep understanding of AI.
• Rapid deployment - The ability to quickly go live in 30 days or less, versus multiple months.
• Simple and complex use cases - While other chatbots can handle only simplistic requests, Ada also supports use cases that authenticate users and provide them with personalized information such as account balance, order information and more.
• Multi-lingual support - Ada's chatbot can be trained in one language and propagates the machine learning across multiple languages.

The integration between Ada and Zendesk Chat involves the use of Ada's AI technology to train chatbots to fulfil simple tasks while also identifying when a user needs to be transferred to a live agent. The bot-to-live-agent handoff occurs when more complex or sensitive issues arise, and the chatbot will direct the user to a customer support representative, providing the agent with the full bot conversation history to ensure a seamless transition. For example, if a customer is seeking to cancel their account, the chatbot will direct them to a live agent to increase the probability of retaining the customer.

"As customers become more familiar with bot experiences across platforms, the need to enable a more fulfilling self-service experience is paramount for us. Frustrating interactions for a customer lead to a less beneficial engagement with a live agent, and often results in duplicate conversations," said Mike Murchison, CEO of Ada. "We look forward to our continued partnership with Zendesk to better serve customers at any stage in their lifecycle by providing seamless, pleasant conversations. This is the new wave of customer service and we are proud to power it."

Zendesk Chat, the largest live chat and messaging provider in the world, provides an open and customizable chatbot platform via the Conversations API. Designed to seamlessly integrate with both partners like Ada, this solution lets businesses leverage the power of artificial intelligence to augment their customer interactions and quickly resolve simple tasks. Their chatbot solution provides businesses with the flexibility to build and extend their customer experiences based on their unique needs.

"We're very excited to have Ada as one of our first chatbot partners. Our joint chatbot solution helps bring significant value to customer-centric businesses by letting them accelerate responses to simple inquiries for better first response times, and helps human agents become more efficient by allowing them to prioritize the more complex issues," said Astha Malik, VP of Platform at Zendesk.

Clients already using the integrated platform through the Early Adopter Program have reported dramatic improvements in terms of reduced customer wait times, the volume of inquiries and increased time available to live agents. One early adopter, Stratfor, has already experienced reduced ticket volume and boosted productivity.

"Our department is short-handed and the customer handoff to live agent gives me peace of mind knowing that our customers are able to reach us if they need to," shared Ginger Ward, Manager of Subscriber and Member Services. "I enjoy the flexibility of having the Virtual Assistant to help provide help/support to our customers. This has improved our overall department productivity."