I remember in the early days of Wattpad I was the only person in the community team. Among other things, I was the one who single-handedly answered all the support tickets. When it was only tens of tickets per day, it was not that difficult. As the user base grew, I soon had to deal with hundreds of tickets per day. Fortunately, many of the support tickets were similar in nature. Thus, by having templates to handle these repeated inquires the volume was manageable.
As Wattpad continued to grow, when it came to user support we didn’t take our eyes off the user experience. Initiatives like community peer help or FAQ were developed but the objective was always about empowering users to resolve their issues as soon as possible.
Last year when the Wattpad team told me that they have deployed an AI bot to empower users in the support process, I was intrigued. It was then when I was introduced to Creative Destruction Lab alumni Ada Support.
As Ada Support’s CEO and co-founder Mike Murchison puts it, “Ada Support is Support for 21st Century”. They “provide automation-first chat support anywhere your customers are”.
By integrating Ada Support into the Wattpad app, users can now chat with the bot and communicate the problems they are having. With the power of artificial intelligence, through conversations, the bot will diagnose the issues of which the users are experiencing and then direct them to the appropriate resources or remedies.
Today Ada Support is an integral part of many other companies such as Rogers Communications, Shopify and Coinbase. It has now scaled to millions of support conversations per day, As it scales, through data network effect Ada Support has become more and more intelligent in helping organizations to support their users.
Today Ada Support announced it has raised $2.5 million in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Version One Ventures. Two Small Fish Ventures is also participating in this round. I am so excited that we can be part of Ada Support’s journey. Toronto is the best place for Ada Support to scale its business since Toronto is the epicentre of artificial intelligence. We believe Ada Support will be the support interface for the 21st century.
– Eva
