Build & Deploy AI Support Agents In Minutes | Valerie Li

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #269, we welcomed Valerie Li,  Co-Founder & CEO of Duckie.ai based in San Francisco, CA.

Duckie. ai is a no-code platform for customer support teams to build their own AI agents to deflect tickets and automate repetitive processes.

In this episode, Valerie and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that Michele & her team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #269 Highlight Reel:**

1. AI-Driven Support Is The Future
2. Enhancing CX and EX Through AI
3. Building Customizable AI Support Bots
4. Leveraging Engineering For Strategic Growth
5. AI-Powered Customer Feedback Analysis 

Click here to learn more about Valerie Li

Click here to learn more about Duckie.ai

Huge thanks to Valerie for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & contact center space into the future. 

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Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Summary

AI-Driven Support Team Collaboration

Valerie Lee, founder and CEO of Ducky, discussed her background as an engineer at LinkedIn and Netflix, where she worked on an AI tool to deflect engineering tickets. She highlighted the knowledge gap between support teams and internal product teams, emphasizing the importance of bridging this gap to improve customer support and drive company growth. Valerie explained that Ducky is a platform that enables support teams to build and deploy AI support agents without coding, aiming to enhance communication between customers, support teams, and product developers.

Enhancing CX and EX Through AI

The discussion focused on the importance of improving both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) in customer support. Valerie and CXChronicles emphasized that support tools should not only resolve repetitive tickets but also enhance employee satisfaction by enabling high-value work and relationship building. They highlighted the growing relevance of AI in the industry and the need to focus on employee retention through better tools and practices. The conversation also touched on the transition from traditional call centers to more advanced solutions that support both CX and EX goals.

Customizable AI Support Assistant Development

Valerie discussed the development of Ducky, an AI support assistant initially created for technical sales companies by herself and her co-founder Joe. After participating in YC's 3-month program, they expanded Ducky's capabilities to serve various industries like SaaS, fintech, and e-commerce. However, as they took on larger customers with extensive ticket volumes, they realized the need to empower support teams to build their own AI agents, leading to a new iteration of Ducky that provided customizable building blocks for creating AI workflows without coding.

AI-Powered Customer Support Automation

Valerie and her team at Ducky are building a solution to help companies manage customer communications and support more efficiently at scale. The discussion highlighted how Ducky's AI-powered platform enables non-technical users to create custom bots for common support tasks, potentially reducing the need for additional human support staff and tools. The conversation emphasized the importance of automation in managing increasing complexity as companies grow, while maintaining quality customer experiences.

Engineering Team's Strategic Growth

Valerie discussed Ducky's engineering team, highlighting their senior-level expertise and dual role in both technical development and customer success. She emphasized the company's commitment to paying top market rates for early-stage employees, viewing them as an extension of the founding family. The conversation then shifted to the broader strategy of targeting the customer support and ticket resolution space, with Valerie and the interviewer agreeing on the potential for this area to be transformed from a cost center to a revenue-generating focus.

AI Customer Service Integration Strategies

The discussion focused on building effective teams and technology stacks for AI-powered customer service. Valerie explained that Ducky's success relies on senior engineers who can both observe customer interactions and connect with various tools, while the company uses multiple AI models (including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini) for different tasks. She highlighted Ducky's unique capability to integrate with internal systems through Agent Tools, which allows the AI agent to access and interact with various databases and specialized systems that other platforms cannot handle.

Empowering Support Teams with AI

Valerie discussed her philosophy of empowering customer support representatives to become AI builders rather than just handlers, emphasizing the importance of transforming them into creators of AI workflows using building blocks like Gentec. She argued that AI adoption doesn't lead to job loss but rather enables support teams to tackle more complex issues and grow with the company, acting as controllers of technology. CXChronicles inquired about the ingestion of existing tribal knowledge from tools like Confluence, Jira, and Notion, confirming that Ducky can integrate this information alongside ticket data and activity-based sentiment to enhance its capabilities.

Ducky: Playbook Management Innovation

Valerie and CXChronicles discussed the potential of Ducky to revolutionize playbook management by aggregating and extrapolating valuable information from various sources, such as internal documents and customer interactions. They highlighted the importance of connecting internal engineering tickets with customer support to provide timely updates and improve customer satisfaction. The conversation also touched on the ability to analyze sales call data to identify sentiment trends and align them with ongoing projects, offering a more efficient way to manage customer feedback and internal development priorities.

AI Customer Support for Complex Needs

Valerie discussed Ducky's approach to AI-powered customer support, focusing on providing flexible, customizable solutions for companies with complex support needs. She highlighted Ducky's target market of late-stage startups to mid-market companies in SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech, emphasizing the importance of tailoring support agents and workflows to meet specific business needs. Valerie also touched on the challenges of building and maintaining AI tools, noting that Ducky's horizontal and flexible platform allows companies to avoid the high costs and resource-intensive process of developing internal AI solutions.

AI-Powered Customer Feedback Analysis

Valerie discussed how Ducky AI helps companies gather and analyze customer feedback in real-time using AI, which can summarize sentiment and categorize issues, reducing the time gap between customer feedback and product improvements. CXChronicles emphasized the growing importance of AI in customer service and support, predicting that future CX leaders will leverage AI to automate processes and reduce the need for manual intervention. They also highlighted the potential for Ducky AI to be applied across various customer journey stages, including marketing, sales, and billing. The conversation concluded with Valerie inviting listeners to visit www.key.AI to learn more about Ducky AI and book meetings with the founding team.