ClickUp elevates their customer experience with Ada’s generative AI Agent
ClickUp is an all-in-one project management tool that integrates with platforms across a company’s tech stack to consolidate workflows. They’re focused on helping companies improve productivity and collaboration, amassing 12 million users since their launch in 2017.
Streamlining support after massive growth
As their customer base grew, ClickUp’s support team created a number of ways for their customers to contact them – primarily through email forms. But the experience was inconsistent for customers. Forms would ask for too much or not enough information up front, and agents weren’t primed to handle customer support emails efficiently.
ClickUp had also made live chat available to all their customers. However, triage and routing became a challenge. ClickUp has a robust product offering that includes multiple productivity tools. As a result, their support team handles a long tail of inquiries about a range of products from various user types. Agents were spending considerable time triaging both the issue and user type, then routing customers to the right agent for help.
Allie Hurley, Head of Global Support at ClickUp, was looking for a way to streamline all customer support channels so that customers would receive faster, more efficient, and consistent service. Allie also wanted to equip agents with the right tools and information to be more helpful for customers and the business internally.
The Support Leadership team created a new Digital Support group with Jimmy Sullivan at the helm. Jimmy had previously been a Customer Support Manager, and was promoted to a new strategic role as Manager of Digital Support. He began searching for productized solutions to achieve their goal: resolving 45% of customer support inquiries digitally without human intervention.
Launching a scripted chatbot with Ada
ClickUp partnered with Ada in June 2022 to launch a scripted chatbot. ClickUp replaced their disjointed forms with a single point of contact through Ada. Customers would message with the chatbot across ClickUp’s website and help center, completely self-serving about half of the time.
Jimmy’s team was able to build specific escalation paths for issues that require human support. In those cases, Ada would collect the necessary information based on the customer’s issue and route the customer to the right agent. The agent would receive the customer’s information and context of their conversation with Ada for speedy resolution.
With these early wins locked in, Jimmy assigned more staff to grow Ada’s breadth of knowledge about ClickUp’s suite of products. The scripted chatbot was working well – but Jimmy’s team was spending considerable time manually building out content and escalation paths for their various products and user types. Jimmy and Allie were concerned about scalability, so they turned to Ada’s new AI Agent for a solution.
Introducing generative AI
Ada’s AI Agent is different from a scripted chatbot – and far more advanced – because it is built with native generative AI capabilities. Instead of manually building out scripted content, Jimmy’s team simply connected the AI Agent to their Zendesk Help Center. The AI Agent could then automatically generate answers to customer inquiries using ClickUp’s existing support content, and combine that with customer profile data for a personalized experience.
Since going live, the AI Agent has performed on par with tenured support agents – even suggesting product workarounds that are known to experienced agents, but are not easy to gather from help center articles.
“Our AI Agent pulls from different data sources and articles, and combines that together into a sensible response. I’m impressed that the AI Agent is able to think through the end result that the user is looking to accomplish and pull the specific sections of the Help Center articles to accomplish that goal. So it's far more than just surfacing facts, it's providing actual intelligent resolutions for users.”
"We saw impressive gains when implementing the scripted chatbot, but were blown away by the results of our generative AI Agent. We are consistently updating our product to meet customer needs. With the AI Agent, we no longer have to rely on human intervention to address new customer inquiries that come through when we've updated our product."
ClickUp is measuring success based on Automated Resolutions (AR), a key performance metric developed by Ada. An AR is a conversation between a customer and a company that is relevant, accurate, safe, and does not require a human. Since transitioning from a scripted chatbot to an AI Agent, ClickUp has realized a 20% improvement in their Automated Resolution rate. ClickUp’s customers are receiving a better automated experience and effectively self-serving their needs much more often.
“We use automated resolution rate as a core KPI for our digital support team, and we are reporting it up to our senior leadership because of the efficiencies that we are driving throughout the business.”
ClickUp is also using Ada’s AR metric and insights to determine opportunities for improvement with their AI Agent.
“Ada surfaces relevant conversations with recommendations and an associated AR percentage improvement. This makes it so much easier for us to coach our AI Agent effectively at scale. It takes the guesswork out of building and saves us loads of time.”
The agents who had been manually building content in ClickUp’s original scripted chatbot have been given new and expanded responsibilities. The AI Agent has paved the way for ClickUp’s agents to become more specialized in their given product areas, providing even better service to their customers. ClickUp’s agents have also become more involved in lifecycle and growth strategies with their respective product teams, helping to drive adoption and prevent churn together.
“Our AI Agent has influenced the way we structure our support organization. Our reps have had the time to become specialists in their respective product areas, which has made them more confident and knowledgeable. They have also been able to further their careers at ClickUp by working more closely with our content teams, and contributing to retention and growth projects.”
Looking Ahead
As ClickUp continues to acquire more customers, the support team is set up to scale efficiently while maintaining their SLA and delivering the quality of service that their customers expect.
“Making sure that we maintain our customer satisfaction and customer effort scores is really important, and Ada helps set the tone to do those things. It's good for the customers, it's good for our agents, it's good for scaling our support model, and it's also good for our content effectiveness overall.”
Jimmy’s team remains focused on optimizing their AI Agent with Ada, while Allie is thinking more broadly about applying generative AI to their overall business processes.
“I believe that businesses that are hesitant to use generative AI are going to fall behind their competitors. In the short time since it's been popularized, it's already had a profound impact on the market. It's our responsibility to service our customers and maximize that kind of tool to be as effective as we can.”
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