| Functionality | 3 <p>Ada’s positioning as an AI agent for customer support does mean that its overall feature set as a stand-alone customer support platform is lacking. Though Ada’s AI agent acts as a strong and easy to configure first line of defence, you’ll still need to manage handoffs to real agents elsewhere (which often means paying separately for other helpdesk platforms such as Zendesk). Additionally, you’ll find other common features, such as the ability to build your own help centre/knowledge base, missing in Ada. It’s something which you’re expected to build elsewhere, and provide as a source of training material into Ada. </p> | 7 <p>Thena is one of a handful of up and coming support platforms tailored to B2B focused customers. It's focus is on Slack-centric teams (where it excels), however, it also provides support for email, a basic live chat widget, MS teams and forms. Additionally, we were pleased to see that you can configure an AI agent to respond to messages for you as well as the ability to set up a basic help centre.</p><p>However, it lacks support for many channels that non B2B focused businesses might want such as all social platforms or phone calls.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 3 <p>Given its AI-centric focus, we found Ada to be relatively easy to use on initial set up. It would take an average SMB employee a few hours to be complete the initial configuration and create a functional AI chatbot. However, when progressing to more advanced features, such as setting up processes for an AI agent to execute, we found Ada to be filled with unclear terminology and often confusing UI. Whilst this may be a byproduct of the relative novelty of configuring AI chatbots, we find Ada unintuitive to use if you’re looking to get the most out of the platform.</p> | 6 <p>Thena's web app is well presented, however, given the sheer breadth of features, it can feel overwhelming at times. Instead of a traditional email style inbox, it places a focus on a kanban-style tickets view which may be unintuitive for agents who aren't used to project management platforms. Despite this, the UI was designed well to present information and buttons are intuitively placed such that the learning curve is not too steep. It would take an average SMB employee an hour to master the tool.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>We find Ada’s high-level navigation to be modern and easy to use. However, chatbot configuration interfaces were often confusing and unclear with a less modern, dated feel to them. Additionally, whilst the web app was generally fast, some pages take 2-3 seconds to load.</p> | 7 <p>Thena's web app is well designed, fast to load and easy to use. It has a modern feel to it and looks great in both dark mode or light mode. We especially appreciated the addition of keyboard shortcuts across the inbox that help agents zip through the platform when tackling a large backlog of tickets.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>At present, Ada’s primary customer facing feature is its AI chatbot. Within which you can configure basic elements such as logos, buttons and colours. However, there are additional layers of customisation available in terms of the tone, greetings and responses of the chatbot itself. These are deeply customisable and offer businesses a way to set their chatbots apart from the typical responses you’d expect from first time interactions with non-AI chatbots from competitor platforms.</p> | 6 <p>Thena offers a number of facets for customization. It's internal facing interfaces offer the most scope - with things like inbox views, AI agent context and workflows, all fully configurable.</p><p>However, its external facing interfaces are limited in their customizability. For example, both its live chat widget and help centres only offer basic aesthetic options such as colours and logos.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 4 <p>It's clear that though Ada does provide a self-serve free trial, that the product is designed to be experienced via a demo call. As such, we found the initial setup to be a little confusing, taking around 15 minutes or so. However, given its AI focus, we did appreciate the ease of certain features, for example, adding base knowledge is just a matter of pasting in links and Ada will parse and extract the relevant information.</p><p>To really get the most out of the platform, users will need to spend some time on configuring everything from tone to greetings of the chatbot - as such, full customization can take a week to put together.</p> | 4 <p>Unfortunately, Thena does not offer a self-serve free trial for its platform. Instead you'll need to hop on a sales demo to get access. However, the sales call is often with the founder and was helpful and swift. One we got access, initial setup was limited and the platform can feel slightly overwhelming given the sheer breadth of features and facets you can customize. However, given its Slack centricity, getting connected to it is very simple thanks to a native integration which only takes a few clicks.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>You can get support for Ada in two ways. The first, is via their own AI support agent. In testing we find it helpful for basic queries but ofte overy cautious in its responses and readily opts to hand off to a real agent. The second is via email - when tested, Ada's real agents were quick to reply (< 2 hours), knowledgeable and helpful.</p> | 8 <p>Thena primarly provides support via a 1:1 slack channel with their team. When tested, agents responded in <15 minutes and were well versed and very helpful, even for complex setup style questions. Additionally, Thena provide a well written and rich help centre that can answer most queries.</p> |
| Integratability | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">When tested, Ada doesn't yet have an extensive set of integrations compared to other CS tools. That being said, the majority of key integrations for larger businesses such as with Salesforce, are present.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We notice that whilst it's older rules based product offering did support a much wider array of integrations, these have yet to be ported over to its AI agent product.</span></p> | 5 <p>Thena offers integrations with popular task management platforms (Jira, Linear), CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) and incident management platforms (Rootly, Incident.io). We would like to have seen a Zapier integration like many of its peers offer though. That being said, Thena does offer an API through which technical teams can interact with the platform directly.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Whilst Ada does not offer a self-serve data export feature, it's data export API is rich and well documented and covers all the core areas of data you'd want and expect to export.</p> | 7 <p>Thena offers self-serve export functionality to CSV/JSON for tickets and their details within their web app. Additionally, Thena offers an API through which you can interact with tickets directly.</p> |
