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Innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots are important for every company but even more so for traditional industries trying to stay competitive, according to marketing directors at Zendesk and software company Ada, as well as a customer experience (CX) systems specialist at The Boston Globe.

Ada’s AI and chatbot-based platform helps enterprise businesses to automate CX at scale for organizations including The Boston Globe, they said Sept. 23 during the Zendesk webinar “A CX Moment with The Boston Globe and Ada Support.”

During the half-hour webinar, Zendesk’s guest speakers discussed CX learnings as companies embrace change through a digital-first CX strategy.

“There’s thousands of chatbots out there and they’re not all created equal.

So there’s definitely a wide range of what a chatbot is and what a chatbot could be,” according to Perri Maxwell Chaikof, director of product marketing at Ada.

“At Ada, our core belief is that a brand is only as good as the interactions that it has with its customers,” she said. “It’s not just the logo. It really is about your reputation and how you interact with your customers. And that’s why we describe ourselves as a brand interaction platform. We help brands like The Boston Globe interact with their customers in a conversational way to develop real relationships with them instead of broadcasting to everyone.”

A chatbot provided by Ada is “something you can use to represent your brand across all of the challenges where you’re interacting with your customers and also connect them to other parts of your business,” she pointed out.

“You say that there’s chatbots everywhere. So, chances are, we’re often interacting with chatbots without realizing it?” Sarah Reed, senior director of content and event marketing at Zendesk, asked.

“That’s possible,” according to Maxwell Chaikof. But, “at Ada, we’re really particular about every instance our product should introduce itself,” she said, explaining: “In the case of The Boston Globe… it is called globot. I think that’s a great name. Ada introduces itself and says, ‘Hi, I’m an automated virtual assistant. How can I help you?’”

It is, meanwhile, “imperative that anytime you’re chatting with something automated that it’s disclosing that you’re not yet chatting with a human,” Maxwell Chaikof warned.

That is something Reed said she liked because “I think, for most of us, we’re much more comfortable when we know that we are chatting with a bot but there is possibly, hopefully a human on the other side if I need them.”

Noting that her company has a “stronghold in customer support,” Maxwell Chaikof said her favorite Ada chatbot use cases, in addition to the globot, is “as a tool you can use to help your customers help themselves and drive self-serve support.” However, she added: “What really gets me excited is when people think about using Ada to drive revenue for the business.”

It is “really interesting to look at your chatbot as a representative of your brand – something that’s on 24/7 to help your customers,” according to Maxwell Chaikof. “If they’re looking for support or just to create a relationship with them, encourage them to maintain their subscription, [or] let them know about other offers that you have using Ada – not just for support optimization but also driving revenue and growth for a brand.”

24/7 visibility was something The Boston Globe didn’t have before Ada, Eric Witman, lead CX systems specialist at The Boston Globe, pointed out.

“We started using Zendesk Guide to help have a self-service center,” he said. But he explained: “Ada really complements that. So that’s where we have the Ada chatbot… on Zendesk Guide, and it can be interactive and kind of give you tips as to where to go. And a lot of our content we did pull down from what we had in Zendesk Guide already and put in a more personalized format. So they partner very well together and provide that 24-hour support.”

The main reason the newspaper implemented the chatbot was “to help reduce traffic to the call center,” he said, calling it a “lower-cost solution” than having another phone line be open longer. It was also easy to implement, he noted.

And the results were positive. “We did see a reduction in call volume immediately,” Witman said, explaining: “It wasn’t monumental but it was enough to be able to notice for sure. We saw great traffic to the bot itself and we have a really good containment rate in there as well. So I think we were looking at over an average of somewhere between 89 and 92 percent containment of conversations that don’t need to be escalated to a chat rep. That said, the chat reps are there if needed so it allowed them to be freed up to work on more emails that came in. We used to have a very large chat volume prior to Ada. So it wasn’t just call volume that was reduced… it was chat volume as well, which helps from an ability to handle the work that’s presented, the communications that are presented, as well as a monetary standpoint from an ROI. So those were some of the immediate wins that we saw.”

Summing up the key achievements of the chatbot for the newspaper, Reed pointed to its scalability, flexibility and ability to allow service reps to talk to more customers.

In addition to its traditional, physical newspaper, The Boston Globe offers digital subscriptions, which Witman said “expanded greatly during COVID and we have seen our readership grow.”

The newspaper offered digital subscriptions prior to the pandemic but that “accelerated” during the past year and a half, he said. “With the coverage we put out and the partnerships we had during the pandemic, it’s really grown during that time, especially where people were stuck in the house.”

Although the paper has offered delivery through the pandemic, “people were more comfortable expanding their knowledge about the digital offerings that we had as well,” he added.