How Ada Defied the Impossible: Revolutionizing Customer Service Through AI.
Company profile
Company business details
Motivation to build the product
Mike Murchison and David Hariri were motivated to start Ada after working on another initiative where they identified considerable gaps in customer service. They manually answered tens of thousands of inquiries to gain insights into the challenges businesses face in delivering exceptional customer experiences, which led them to develop Ada's platform.Problem that their product solves
Ada solves the problem of inefficient customer service by automating responses and allowing for personalized customer experiences. The end users are businesses that seek to improve customer engagement and satisfaction while reducing reliance on IT for AI deployment. This is essential for businesses wanting to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.Their unfair advantage
Ada's unfair advantage lies in its ability to easily deploy AI solutions without IT dependency, delivering value quickly, typically within 30 days.Strategies
Idea Validation Stage
Customer-Centric Foundation
At its inception, Ada was built on the realization that many brands fail at the critical moment when customers seek to interact. By focusing on the need for enhancing customer experience right from the beginning, the founders quickened their path to product-market fit. They embraced customer feedback and experiences to shape the core values and goals of the company, ensuring that the technology they developed would directly address common customer pain points and elevate engagements.
Pre-Launch (Product Development & MVP)
Customer Experience Research
Before launching Ada, Mike Murchison and his co-founder David Hariri took the initiative to join multiple customer support teams. They aimed to understand the existing gaps in customer service by manually answering tens of thousands of inquiries themselves. This hands-on experience provided them with the insights needed to build a product that would enhance customer experiences, focusing on the need for automated support that was both personalized and engaging. By closely engaging with the target user base, they ensured that Ada would effectively address real-world customer service challenges.
Customer Ownership Philosophy
The founders of Ada, Mike and David, initiated a philosophy focused on giving their customers ownership of their product. This was translated into concrete actions by consistently listening to customer feedback and designing their product development around that feedback. They believed that fostering a sense of ownership among customers would drive engagement and loyalty to the product. This principle was evident from the early stages of their first company, Volley, where they witnessed the importance of acting on customer feedback.
Extensive Networking for Insights
While working as customer service reps, Mike engaged with various Vice Presidents of Customer Experience to gather insights on industry challenges. He cold-called these individuals to ask about their customer-service approaches in the face of scaling problems. This strategy provided invaluable market intelligence and confirmed that many companies were trying to reduce customer interaction rather than improving it, fueling the motivation to create a solution that prioritized quality customer engagement rather than treating support as a cost center.
Value-Based Consultative Selling
Mike Merchesen of ADA emphasizes a value-based consultative approach when engaging with prospects. Instead of leading with AI jargon, his team first seeks to understand the specific problems faced by customers. In the initial stages of ADA, they operated manually, identifying the pain points in customer service before automating responses with AI. This foundational knowledge allows ADA to communicate effectively, ensuring they are offering solutions specifically tailored to the customers' needs, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of selling AI tools without understanding their practical application.
Learn more about Ada
Interview with Mike Murchison: Dreamers Who Ignored Naysayers
The $750 Billion AI Opportunity in Customer Service | Mike Murchison, Co-founder and CEO of Ada
Successful AI Implementation isn’t about Technology with Mike Murchison, CEO at Ada
