GRIT - Ed.04 - Flipbook - Page 23
CONVERSATIONS
ARE THE NEW
CURRENCY
By Mike Murchison, Co-founder and CEO,
Ada; Next 36, 2014
year has been an exercise in challenging the
T his
status quo. Out of necessity—and seemingly overnight—our world collectively invented and adapted to
new ways of living and working digitally. While many
of us experienced frustration with this change, our
new routine has its advantages. For example, there
is less traffic, we spend more time with those in our
bubble, and businesses are more open to recruiting
internationally. Our world would have never willingly
adopted a global, digital-only approach to work had
it not been for COVID-19. But we can all agree that,
post-pandemic, we’re unlikely to ever revert back to
exactly the way things were.
For Ada, this has meant questioning our approach
to office space and synchronous work. We had never
been a strictly 9–5 workplace, even before the pandemic. And while we didn’t insist on our team being in
the office every day, we always had a physical space
in which our team could congregate and collaborate.
We learned very quickly this year that being digital-only is very different from being digital-first. Recruiting, training, and managing teams 100% remotely was the stress-test of our systems and culture. I’m
proud of how our team has adjusted to a digital-only
environment. We had always maintained that trusting our team to have ownership over their own time
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GRIT
HOW WE WORK
The most successful
businesses moving
forward will be those
who embrace and crave
customer interaction.
would empower them to do
their best work. That hypothesis
was confirmed this year as everyone worked from home, and
Ada grew to be used more than
12.5 billion times every month.
Ada is not the only company that has had to adapt, all
of our clients made the same
transition alongside us. It was
incredibly rewarding to see our
product perform at scale, helping hundreds of millions of customers access rapidly changing
information at the pandemic’s
peak, and preserving our clients’
human agents for high priority tasks. Our partnership with
Zoom is a great example. As
Zoom grew from 10M daily active users to 300M daily active
users almost overnight, Ada’s
conversational AI ensured that
every visitor to Zoom’s website
could engage with their business
regardless of the time of day or
language spoken. At the same
time, prospects and paying customers are now prioritized and
routed by Ada to a sales representative, so Zoom doesn’t
miss out on those opportunities
amid the myriad questions from
free users.
Zoom’s case is demonstrative of an emerging trend:
the need for collaboration between marketing, sales,
and support teams to deliver best-in-class CX.
As customers, we expect our experience with a
business to be reliable, consistent, and personalized
across the lifetime of our relationship. Whether we are
buying software, shoes, or box subscriptions, we are
also buying the experience that company has to offer.
This includes the conversations we have with those
businesses before and after we become customers.
The status quo is that customer interactions are generally bad—bad for customers, and bad for businesses.
Consumers are increasingly turning to social media,
publicly airing grievances with companies they’ve tried
to contact. Businesses are actively seeking ways to
prevent their customers from reaching them, and keep
costs down. It’s a losing proposition for parties on both
sides of the conversation. Simply put, as businesses
today get bigger, they speak to their customers less.
Ada is changing this.
This is not a new problem. The shift to our new
digital life has only made the issue more urgent, while
ironically opening up opportunities for new solutions.
Conversational AI tools like Ada invite businesses to
take a different approach to customer contact. At Ada,
we value customer conversations, and actively encourage more of them. Conversational AI with Ada allows
businesses to scale high-quality interactions across the
customer journey, so every customer can be successful.
We invite siloed teams in marketing, sales and support
to collaborate inside our product. Together we execute
on a CX strategy that reduces cost and human effort,
while improving CSAT and driving revenue. We encourage our clients to have more conversations, and drive
more powerful conversations as a result.
Just as we have all questioned the best ways to live
and work in 2020, Ada is challenging the status quo
when it comes to customer contact. The most successful businesses moving forward will be those who embrace and crave customer interaction. Conversations
are the new currency, and we should all be imagining
more ways to connect with each other.
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